‘But I think he did.’
‘I’ve never been able to tolerate that—the schoolboy’s picnic aspect of socialism—children defying authority—you know! For instance, when Johnny and his friends were kidnapped by the police, it was a question of hanging, and some of them were hanged. But Johnny always told the story roaring with laughter.’ Remembering the story, Martha smiled. ‘Oh, yes, yes! If something’s colourful and bizarre, that’s all you ask! And they were all very brave, of course. But if more sensible methods had been used, perhaps none of the derring-do would have been necessary?’
‘Well, Mrs Van, I wasn’t there.’
‘Well, it irritates me, it always has.’
Martha said: ‘Always, Mrs Van?’ So hard was it, even now, to hear what this old friend always called ‘personal matters’, that Martha heard her tongue trip, and she went red. Mrs Van reddened too, and lowered her eyes. She sat wryly smiling: a look often on her face these days, since Flora had moved into Maisie’s rooming house. Flora and Maisie were increasingly subjects of scandal, the latest being that Flora was living with—not the man from McGrath’s stores—‘at least they are the same age, Matty!’—but young Tommy Brown. Malicious people even said that Maisie and Flora shared him.
‘It’s all so very strange, Matty. The more I think about it all, the more I—I can’t stand it, Matty. There’s something about life…Did you know that Johnny came to this country in the first place, because of Flora? Yes, it’s true. He left everything he made for himself on the Rand—and he was chairman here, and secretary there, and everyone knew him. But his children hated Flora and she was miserable, and so he came here to make a new life for her—you’re going to say, it happened, I suppose.’
‘Well, yes, I was.’
Johnny had dedicated his memoirs—not to the Labour Movement, not to Mrs Van, not to ‘world socialism,’ but to Flora. ‘To the love of my life, Flora, the best and the kindest and the most beautiful of women.’ He had whispered this to Mrs Van late one night while Flora was at the pictures. ‘Write this down for me, my dear…’ She had done so. ‘Now read it to me—yes, yes, that’s right.’ She had put it, as he wanted, in front of the memoirs. ‘Of course,’ she said to Martha. ‘I’d be quite within my rights to tear that dedication up! He was not in his right mind that night. He was rambling, earlier.’
‘But Mrs Van, you didn’t tear it up!’
‘All right! It happened. But my point is made, I think!’
In the event, nothing was suppressed, or even toned down; and reading it was like listening to Johnny’s voice; they were the memoirs of a gallant and innocent boy; and Mrs Van sat smiling as she turned the pages of the history which to her had been a lifetime of committee work, paperwork, research, self-discipline, self-deprivation.
Concurrently with this, Martha did a very different job of editing. Some weeks after Thomas’s death, the Native Commissioner in S…had delivered to his office by an African in a loin-cloth who said he came from Chief so and so, with greetings, a sheaf of stained, damp papers which were found in Thomas’s hut. These papers were sent to Thomas’s wife, who sent them to Jack Dobie, who gave them to Martha, since, he said, they were clearly meant to be part of Thomas’s report on conditions in the rural areas. They were in a dreadful state; for the ink had run where rain-water had dripped on them, probably from an ill-thatched roof. Ants had left half a hundred sheets looking like red-edged lace paper. And in any case, the pages were not numbered, and apparently had never been put in order. How was Martha, or anybody, to know what Thomas had meant? How much had been destroyed, or lost? Also, there were notes, comments, scribbled over and across and on the margins of the original text, in red pencil. These, hard to decipher, were in themselves a different story, or at least, made of the original a different story.
Every morning as the sun rose, Thomas had risen too, and had sat in the doorway of his hut, a writing pad on his knees and a bottle of ink in the dust beside him. People emerged stretching and yawning from their huts into weak sunlight, the women fetched water from the river, and attended to the millet patches, the men sharpened their spears for hunting. Thomas sat there, and wrote; and again at night, in the light from the cooking fires and, more than once, by moonlight.
But what was he trying to write? A paragraph about life in Sochaczen was followed by poetry, in Polish. Translated, it turned out to be a folk song. Then, how his mother cooked potatoes. Then, across this, in red pencil: If these people could be persuaded to grow potatoes—but what use, if the salt has lost its savour? A great many Jewish jokes, or rather Yiddish. Solly translated. (He, too, was writing memoirs, called: Patterns of Betrayal. Yes, I feel my life is over, Matty, and when I’ve finished this book, I shall live on a kibbutz in Israel.) The jokes, he said, might have come out of a joke-book: he had cut his teeth on them. Was there a theme or tendency shown in their choice? Not unless there was a theme running through all Jewish jokes, and if so, he’d leave it to Martha to sneer at it. There was a long article, about how to run a carp farm. A tributary of the Zambesi might very well be netted off as a carp farm, and the carp used to supplement the Africans’ diet. Or for fertilizer? said the red pencil, across this. Stories: ‘Once there was a man who travelled to a distant country. When he got there, the enemy he had fled from was waiting for him. Although he had proved the uselessness of travelling, he went to yet another country. No, his enemy was not there.’ (Surprised, are you! said the red pencil.) ‘So he killed himself.’ To make fish stew in the manner of the Mamonka…first catch your fish. If you keep your grain on stilts, to save it from the white ants, why not walk on stilts yourself?
Pages of this kind of thing, damp, musty-smelling pages, which Jack and Martha turned, never once saying, at least, not at the start: Well, our old friend Thomas, he was off his head, at the end.
But that was not all. At last there emerged a sort of pattern, or one could be made. Because, embedded in all this, were stories of the people in the village, a history of the tribe, facts, figures—as if, sometimes, Thomas had intended to produce material for the Survey. Many of the biographies were obituaries. ‘So and so, “born in the year of the heavy rains”, aged about thirty. Married. Three children, two dead of malaria. Never seen a white man before myself. Never been out of the Valley. Died this morning.’ ‘So and so. I think fifty-odd. His father was once in a town, but I can’t make out which. It had “men of stone” in the streets, which he took to be protective magic figures. Has had two wives. Nine children, three still living. Can understand headlines in the newspaper. Died this morning.’ Quite sensible, these were, and full of interest. But across them, as across everything else, the notes in red pencil.
The obituaries spread to include ancestors, parents, children, animals. ‘So and so, born the year the lightning hit the Chief’s hut,’ then the history of the Chief, and what the witchdoctor said about lightning. About the birth of the Chief’s first son: he was born feet foremost because ‘he wanted to walk as soon as he was born.’ About the village of the mother of the first-born, which was across the river, and then about the mother’s brother’s personal habits—he was jealous of the old goat his mother used to sleep beside, for warmth on cold nights—there were no blankets twenty years ago; and when he had his six teeth knocked out, the four incisors and two upper canines, with the chisel, he had never once uttered a sound, as was right and proper, but he had a fit, and thereafter the people of the tribe knew that the gods had not been pleased with him, for the poor quality of the sacrificed teeth. But he ran down a deer better than anyone, and no one knew as much about catching fish by the use of herbs. And so on. Before the conclusion: Died this afternoon, it was hard to remember who had died: Martha had to leaf through perhaps fifty sheets to find out. And in the middle of all this, slap in the middle of Africa, Poland: On Wednesday afternoon, I had to take the horse to the smith for my uncle, and Mira from the school window called to me: Leave the horse and come to the river. So I went swimming in the pool with
Mira, and the horse broke its rein from the tree and ran away. My father beat me. My mother made a poultice of sour milk. What the father breaks, the mother makes. Even so I couldn’t sit down for a week. These people, these red mud-smeared savages don’t beat their children. Comment across this in red pencil: It could be said, therefore, that gentleness saves sour milk.
‘Vermin, vermin,’ said the red pencil, ‘the world is a lump of filth crawling with vermin.’ ‘Death here. Death there too. Everywhere. Blood on his face where the bullet went in under the cheek-bone. Death in the bottom of the river. His face, red: the faces of the Mamonka, red with red mud. His hair: red. Their hair: red. His red: blood. Their red: mud. Did he have lice in his hair? (A riddle!) No. Neither do the Mamonka, the red mud keeps lice away. The backside of a baboon, scaly and red.’
Obscenities in English, Polish, Yiddish.
‘If flies buzz, buzz harder. There are enough flies here—to kill a crow. Kill. Crows are more common than eagles, while vultures sit on the trees around the village smelling our deaths. The vultures come down from the trees gobble gobble with their red necks, thin skin of red necks puff and blister like wounds puff in the sun. A wound made by fire, if a leg is left lying in the fire too long, first has flies walking over it, then the skin puffs and blisters and walks gobble gobble. Vermin, Swine, Murderers, Apes. Apes with red, blistering behinds. Kill, Kill, my comrades, and make a good meal of it. The meal is kept on stilts away from the white ants, and so are you.’
In the end, there were two versions of Thomas’s last testament—Jack Dobie’s name for it. One version consisted of the short biographies and the obituaries and the recipes and the charms and the tales and anecdotes. The other, typed out on flimsy sheets which could be inserted over the heavier sheets of the first version, made a whole roughly like the original—more or less common sense, as a foundation, with a layer of nonsense over it. But even in the first version, the ‘sensible’ one, was a note of something harsh and repellent. Martha sat holding this extraordinary document, fitting the leaves in between each other, separating them, so that sense and nonsense met each other, as in a dance, and left each other; and meanwhile thought of Thomas, the strong, brown man she had known—this was the same person. She felt she should ask the real Thomas, the man she had loved, to forgive her, for her obtuseness. Presumably this person revealed to her, in this document, had been there all the time? Yet she did not recognize much of Thomas in this, except (and she did not know why) perhaps in the facetiousness which marred even the most straightforward entries and which, perhaps, was a line forward into the man who wrote ‘vermin, vermin, we are all vermin’? Yet facetiousness had not been a quality of Thomas’s. He had had an abrupt, grim humour—yes. For instance, the grimness of the story of when he visited his old teacher, in Israel: And how’s evolution with you, my teacher? Is that you, Thomas Stern? Are you still working hard at your Latin?
Jewish. The Jewish acquiescence in suffering. Except that it is everyone’s acquiescence in suffering.
What did you say was the theme of the Yiddish jokes you cut your teeth on, Solly?—I shall leave it to you to sneer, Matty, I have no comment.
‘But what on earth are we going to do with this thing?’ she said to Jack.
‘He was nuts, wasn’t he? Burn it.’
In the end she took it to Mrs Van who read it all one night, and telephoned Martha in the morning.
‘That was a very strange thing to do, copying out all that nonsense on to the flimsies.’
‘It was the nearest I could get to the original.’
‘But why on earth should you want to?’
‘But it’s not honest, otherwise.’
‘It’s a Foundation—they don’t want this sort of thing.’
‘They don’t want anthropology either—but if there’s anything in this stuff, that’s what it’s nearest to.’
‘Lose it, Matty. Drop it into the nearest well.’
‘I keep thinking of Thomas, going crazy in that village, trying to get messages out.’
The same could be said of anyone in a mental hospital. Be sensible, Matty. Next time some enthusiastic amateur like Thomas asks for money, instead of giving it, they’ll say look what happened to that maniac in Southern Zambesia.’
‘I suppose so.’
Martha wrote to the Foundation that the survey material was lost. The bundle of papers lay about the flat, with the manuscript Martha had made of it. She could not make herself throw it away. When it was the only thing left in the empty flat, after she had finished packing to go to England, she threw it into her suitcase and took it with her.
At the end everything happened quickly. The divorce was set down in the High Court two months before they expected, and a berth became available on an earlier ship.
The divorce itself was nothing but a formality, as the lawyers had promised.
Anton and Martha and their lawyers, and Marjorie and Jasmine—just up from Johannesburg to visit her parents—went to Court together. At the Court, Martha was relieved that Mr Maynard was nowhere in sight, though he might have been: he was now a High Court Judge. The appropriate lies were told, and Martha and Anton came out of the Court together to find Bettina waiting for Anton. She was apologetic about ‘intruding at such an awkward moment’, but she had been unable to get her car, parked some blocks away, to start.
‘Well, I’ll come and get everything packed later,’ Anton said to Martha. He hesitated, then kissed her on the cheek, while Bettina smiled as if to say: Of course! Quite right, don’t think that I object. The two women were so concerned to assure each other of their magnanimity, that in fact their faces were strained by smiling, and they were both relieved when Anton at last went off with Bettina.
‘What a farce,’ said Jasmine. ‘However, they made a handsome couple.’
Marjorie said: ‘Who’d have thought it! It has to be Anton who makes a suitable marriage in the end. Are you coming tonight, Matty?’
There was a meeting that night, which Jasmine and Marjorie had promised to attend. Marjorie had said: ‘It’s a crowd of new people—who knows, perhaps this time it really will achieve something?’
‘What’s the point?’ said Martha. ‘I’m leaving next week.’
‘Oh, isn’t it dreadful, no one left. Please come, for old times’ sake. There’s only me now to do anything—but of course, these new people will take over now, I expect.’ Marjorie was in tears. Ashamed, she said: ‘Yes, I know, I’m terribly tense. I’m sorry. If I don’t watch out I’ll be having a nervous breakdown—imagine, I always used to despise women like me.’
That night, Marjorie and Martha went to an ugly office not a hundred yards from their old office in Founders’ Street—now demolished.
They were a few minutes late, and as they went up the stairs they joked about their corruption—once they would never have dared to be late.
They stood in the doorway, looking around to see who they knew. No one—they were all strangers.
There was something about all these faces—what was it?—of course! They all looked such babies: they were in their early twenties, while Martha and Marjorie, six, seven years older, were a different generation.
‘Thanks for coming,’ said an intense, dark youth—‘we are glad to welcome members of the old guard.’
Luckily the two guests realized in time that this was not a joke, and refrained from either smiling or exchanging glances. But their sense of shock made them feel as if they had. The young man nodded unsmiling at an already full bench. People squeezed up: Marjorie and Martha squeezed in. As they did so, Jasmine came in, looking far too elegant. She had been at a family dinner with her parents, and yet another suitable businessman they hoped she would marry. Jasmine found a few empty inches on the end of the opposite bench, and sat on it, having examined it carefully for dust. This made a bad impression, and eyebrows went up. Meanwhile, the intense youth continued with a speech. He was persuading them into something: he had a vision which he wished them to
share—enormous sums of money were involved. When he at last mentioned the final amount, Martha felt Marjorie’s elbow in her ribs, and she looked around to see why these apparently sane young people did not throw him out as a madman. He was speaking fast and well, leaning forward, his eyes first on one face and then moving on to the next. He spoke, in intimacy, to one person, as if they two were utterly alone, and then, having established this connection in the eyes of everyone, moved on to the next. But instinctively he knew that Martha, Marjorie and Jasmine could not be absorbed into a public tête-à-tête—his eyes moved past them—not, however, without a small smile which said: you’d trust me if you knew me!
Jackie Bolton. Martha was so strongly transported back to that other office, that other group, she had to look around to see if Anton Hesse, Andrew McGrew, the two sensible, solid men whose task it was to calm and oppose, were sitting in their places. And how did Jasmine feel—who had after all loved Jackie Bolton? Both Marjorie and Martha looked to see: Jasmine had the wry look of one judging a younger self; and she, like them, was being careful how she directed her glances of curiosity—for, knowing Jackie Bolton, they knew how passionately this orator would resent infidelities of attention.
Yes, there they were: in a corner sat a square, bespectacled young man taking notes, and each time the orator mentioned that fantastic sum of money and spoke of a ‘nation-wide network’ he allowed himself a humorous grimace. And sitting beside the impassioned orator in the position of chairman (who should have welcomed them officially—it was not the orator’s task at all) sat another silent, judgement-reserving person, in this case a large, dark, rather beautiful girl, in style like a Turgenev heroine.
As for the others, they all leaned forward, absorbed, lost, gone into the speaker’s fine, high-winging language. The two silent critics were a minority and knew it. So if history was repeating itself—and why not? If the dramatis personae were the same, presumably the plot was also—this group would not be in existence, these people would not sit all night on uncomfortable benches talking about nation-wide networks which would transform the country, if it had not been for the impassioned orator? He it was, presumably, who had fired them all, fused them all; he was the risk-taker, the spark, the vision-maker—and the sensible young man in the corner, and the beautiful, sensible girl might radiate a judicious calm in vain. And if they disapproved, which they did, what were they doing here at all? My dear, sensible friends! Martha found herself addressing these two silently: you imagine you are here as representatives of common sense, don’t you; and you are having ‘a restraining influence’. Well, don’t fool yourselves—he will have his way, set everything in motion, form everything, and in what he forms will be the seeds of its destruction. So you can foretell the end of what you are creating now, if you know how to look for the signs: you find them, my friends, in what you are forgiving this lovable young maniac for, in those irritating things which you meet to discuss (feeling rather disloyal to the group) and decide are not really important after all, the vision’s the thing. And, keeping your minds firmly on the vision, as if it were an entity, a thing, quite separate from the minds and personalities which created it, you overlook the lies, the exaggerations, and the sheer damned lunacy, because you know in your hearts that you haven’t the spark, you couldn’t set anything in motion. While you are sitting around saying: there isn’t the basis, there aren’t the conditions, it’s quite impossible (and you are absolutely right: there never is the basis, it is always impossible—if you leave out of account the recklessness of this inspired young idiot), he has already lit the fire, and things are in full swing, the pot’s on the boil—and the fat’s in the fire. Of course he, the inspirer, will soon have a nervous breakdown, or be ill in some way, or lose interest and go off somewhere else where, he believes, there will be uncorrupted and whole people who can’t ruin his vision—as you are doing, he thinks. It will be you who will try to put in order (a phrase you will use continually) the mess he has left behind. You’ll say, oh, what a pity it happened like that, ‘if only’ he had not created so much dissension, offended so many people, frightened off so many because of what were obviously lies—in short, created such an atmosphere of intrigue, unpleasantness and unreality. If only, if only…then there would have been a fine, healthy organization and the nation would have been transformed. But my dear, sensible friends, without the ‘unreality’, ‘the lunacy’ (you’ll be using such phrases for years; you two will probably even get married on the strength of your disappointment over the ‘unreality’) there would never have been anything at all, that’s the point; it always happens like this; that is the point; the ‘if only’ which is so important to you, which you will be muttering to yourself in five, six years’ time to soften your feelings of shame, waste, nostalgia, for what-might-have-been, well, that ‘if only’ shows you never understood the first thing about what was going on. And never will.