Landlocked (17 page)

No: this was something quite different, on a different level—directly physical. If she let her connection with Thomas weaken; if she let her—what? Body? (but what part of it?) remember Anton and that he was her husband, well, her nerves reacted at once and in the most immediately physical way. She vomited. Her bladder became a being in the flesh of her lower stomach, and told her it was there and on guard. It did not like what she was doing—did not like it at all. Her stomach, her intestines, her bladder complained that she was the wife of one man and they did not like her making love with another.

But of course, none of this could be told to Anton, or even mentioned to him. They were being civilized, he and she; they made civilized arrangements about marriage when it was not a success, and lived together like brother and sister, sharing single beds in a small bedroom, saying things like: ‘Did you have a good day, Anton?’

‘Yes, very good. I’m reorganizing that whole department. Yes, I may be an enemy alien and a damned German, but I’m organizing their freight department for them.’

‘And about time too, I’m sure.’

‘And I went to see Colonel Brodeshaw. After all, he is Member of Parliament for this constituency.’

‘Oh, good, can he help you?’

‘I think he wants to. I begin to think that Marxist theory underrates the role that the democratic consciousness plays
in the British way of life. It is not only a mask for reaction, it is not just hypocrisy.’

‘Oh, you think not?’

‘No. Although he is a proper old Blimp, he is really very decent.’

‘Well, that’s
because
he’s an old Blimp, perhaps.’

‘Yes, that’s quite true, Matty, you’ve put your finger on it. Only a real old Tory like Colonel Brodeshaw, someone who really believes his own propaganda, could afford to be like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘Well, you know’—Anton drawled this out, rather patronizing, apparently, though it concealed a deep gratitude, and even the kind of terror a child feels at the unknown: ‘I said to him, I cannot conceal this from you, I am a communist.’

‘But surely he must know you were one, by now.’

‘No, that isn’t the point. It was essential to tell him so that he wouldn’t think I was pulling wool across his eyes. They place great importance on this decency of theirs.’

‘Well, so what did he say he’d do?’

‘It’s not easy, after all. I told him that I keep writing letters to everyone I knew before the war. It’s all the cities in Germany, when you really add it up.’ A silence. His breathing changed, harshened. The dark room was filled with it—quick and soft breathing, like panting. Martha listened to it—not for the first time. Anton had bad nightmares: most nights he cried out to oppressors and torturers, and thrashed his long body about in bed. But he did not know he had bad dreams, and considered people who did to be neurotic.

‘He ought to be able to make enquiries from the military authorities.’

‘Yes, he said he would write.’

‘And the East Zone?’

‘He can’t do anything about that, of course. I’ve written to the authorities myself.’

‘It’ll all take time then.’

‘Yes, well, there’s been a war on, there’s no getting away from that.’

Until Anton’s future was settled—that is, until he was
naturalized so that he and Martha could get divorced; or until he decided he did not want to be naturalized, in which case Martha could leave him without doing him damage, these two were stuck together. Whether they liked it or not. But he could not make any plans until he could get news from Germany. He was writing letters, dozens of letters a week, into the ruins that were Germany.

‘One thing Colonel Brodeshaw did say: he thought that a lot more people were killed in the bombing than we know yet.’

‘I expect he’s right.’

‘Or perhaps they are prisoners of war in the Soviet Union—no joke that, you can’t expect the Russians to be soft-hearted after everything.’

Such conversations, held almost nightly, twisted the strings of pity right through Martha, and made it necessary for her to go and put her arms around him. But she could not, because otherwise she would get ill. Besides, presumably Millicent did. But she was continually torn, and continually on the edge of physical discomfort, if not sickness.

Thomas understood it all perfectly.

‘Yes, of course, Matty, you know nothing at all about these things. A woman has a husband and she is faithful to him. That is the law.’

‘Whose law?’

‘I didn’t make it.’

‘Shall I go home then?’

‘No. Provided you’re not surprised that sometimes you don’t feel well. Your vagina is very close to certain other organs and they dislike your loose behaviour.’

‘It’s all very simple, then.’

‘Yes, provided we stick to the rules. But they aren’t our rules, that’s the trouble.’

‘And your wife?’ she could not prevent herself asking.

His face clenched into the torment he always showed when he spoke of his wife. She waited until he looked at her.

‘What do you want me to say, Martha?’

‘You are never faithful to her. Is she faithful to you?’

‘Yes,’ he said—but with rage, bitterness.

‘Why are you angry?’

‘You are right to ask,’ he said after a while. He took her hands and held them either side of his face. He smiled at her, his eyes troubled.

‘I don’t understand.’

‘No. Of course you don’t. Suppose I don’t?’ He turned his warm mouth against her palm and she felt how its chill struck up through his lips. ‘You’re cold, Matty. Perhaps I should get a heater up here?’ He pulled the heavy army blankets over her. She lay, chilly, under a weight of blankets. Through the minute window, the winter stars shone, brilliant but distorted by the flawed glass.

He, sitting naked on the edge of the bed, a brown, strong man with skin milky sweet and white on the loins, his brown hand holding hers, was warm and easy, sending out waves of heat like a hot stone when the sun goes down.

‘I’m not really cold.’

‘Yes, you are. It’s because of your immoral behaviour. Well, there’s only one thing for women, they have to stay married to one man and stay faithful, no matter what their husbands do.’

‘I begin to see your point. Do you think it will take long for our nerves to catch up with our new principles?’

‘Centuries, very likely. Perhaps there’ll be a mutation though. Perhaps that’s why we are all so sick. Something new is trying to get born through our thick skins. I tell you, Martha, if I see a sane person, then I know he’s mad. You know, the householders. It’s we who are the nearest to being—what’s needed.’

She looked at the big peasant, sitting on the edge of the bed in the low light, while the stars dazzled in the cheap glass. She smiled because he called himself sick.

‘Ah no, not that smile—I won’t have it. I tell you, everything’s changed and only a few people really know it. And even we don’t really know much. It was once like this: a child was born in a house that had a tree outside it. It was an elm tree. His grandfather had planted it. The child grew
up while the tree shed its leaves and grew them again. He quarrelled with his father, but afterwards lay under the elm tree and felt at peace. He slept with his first girl under the elm tree, and their baby was put to sleep under the elm tree, and when his wife died she was buried under the elm tree, and as an old man, he stood at his gate and looked at the tree and thought: That tree has been with me all my life, I’m smaller than that tree.’

‘And now—you mean it’s a building or a street instead of a tree?’

‘Not at all, it isn’t a building at all—that’s not important, the city isn’t important, not really. The big city’s not been with us long enough to be important, we are already beyond it. Because now we think: that star over there, that star’s got a different time scale from us. We are born under that star and make love under it and put our children to sleep under it and are buried under it. The elm tree is out of date, it’s had its day. Now we try all the time, day and night, to understand: that star has a different time scale, we are like midges compared to the star. And that’s why you’re all on edge and why I’m sick although I’m a peasant from Sochaczen.’

‘Are you going to go early again?’

‘In an hour. So we can’t make proper love tonight. But next time, all afternoon.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘No, the day after.’ A pause. ‘You are going to say, once you were here nearly every afternoon?’

‘No, but I was thinking it.’

‘Then just go on thinking it and don’t say it. Because I can’t help it. No, it’s not another woman. Were you thinking that?’

‘Of course.’

‘No: It’s money. I’m making money. Unlike you, when I work, I think in terms of money. I’m learning that it’s terrifyingly easy to make money.’

She laughed.

‘Ah no, don’t laugh. You’re making a bad mistake if you laugh. I knew you were thinking: he’s found another
woman. But no, you’re enough for me, at last one woman’s enough. Though I’m not saying for how long of course.’

‘On principle.’

‘Yes, on principle. But I don’t want you to laugh about money. I’ve got to outwit it. I’ve got to find a way of not becoming Thomas Stern, rich merchant of this city.’

‘Well, I’ll be here, anyway.’

Now she was spending all day in the loft. She came at about nine in the morning, walking across the vivid lawns in the garden of Sarah Stern, Thomas’s brother’s wife. The two women looked at each other as if they had not seen each other. Sometimes Martha did not go home until late at night. Anton’s affair with Millicent took new wings as a consequence, and the women who wanted to drink tea and talk did not know where she was. She was living in the shed—that’s what it amounted to. This had become her home, and Thomas visited her in it.

The African group—or rather,
an
African group—now met weekly at Johnny Lindsay’s house, because he was too often ill to promise attendance at the office in Founders’ Street.

If he had been well, would so many men have gone to the office? Probably not. For years dark-skinned people had been going in and out of Johnny’s house in trust; for years it had been a house that Africans visited when in trouble. Any white person dropping in to visit Johnny for a meal, knew that there would almost certainly be a black person sitting down too.

The thing is, how did he get away with it? How was it possible, two decades before isolated ‘progressives’ asked carefully chosen black people to their houses, that Johnny had virtually abolished the colour bar in his house? Why was it that, living in a street known as ‘coloured’ (though of course no law said it was) and working as a militant socialist and preaching equality and brotherhood day and night—why was he not arrested, or put in some kind of trouble by the authorities?

Well, there is no answer to this question. It is, after all, a question of what people are, and about this we know very little. Some people can do things other people can not—so much we do know. Johnny, because of some quality to which we do not know how to give a name, had been living for twenty years, quite openly, in a way that contravened every law, written and unwritten, in the Colony. Nothing had happened to him.

Probably the African group would have met at his house even if he had not been ill. Though of course ‘the African group’, which sounds, put like that, so solid an entity, was
nothing of the sort. Seldom were the same faces seen at successive meetings. Some had gone back home to countries hundreds of miles away, some were ill, or they had to work late, or they were in prison for some pass offence, or so-and-so had died. The black population were always on the move, were vulnerable to unkind chance or accident, and anyway consisted of aliens. In short, they were like the white people. Who ran the African group? Johnny Lindsay, old miner from the Rand, born in Cornwall. Jack Dobie, ‘Red agitator’ from the Clyde. Mrs Van der Bylt, a Dutchwoman from a village in the Cape. Martha Hesse, English, but married to a German and the mistress of a Pole. Athen, newspaper-seller from Greece.

And the black people came from Nyasaland, Northern Rhodesia, the Portuguese territories, as well as from distant areas of this Colony whose boundaries were arbitrary lines drawn by conquest. Who, sitting in that room, could say: This is my country, this is my home? Not one. Perhaps Johnny Lindsay, who had achieved the remarkable feat, for this Colony, of living in one house for fifteen years. Perhaps Mr Matushi, who was after all a Mashona. But Mr Matushi did not think of this town as home; he longed for his village, which was five days’ walking distance.

The African group was still officially ‘the African group of the Social Democratic Party’, whose existence had split this Party two years before, when it was the Official Opposition to the Government. It was this group which had made it impossible for Labour ever to get into power. Because of this group, a minority of white people would forever be marked as Reds and communists, kaffir-lovers. Because of it, the respectable right wing of the Labour Party, now consisting entirely of white trade unionists, but men who after all had had positions of national importance, would never achieve Cabinet posts, or be—as at least two of them had had good reason to expect—Prime Minister. These cautious people, wanting to save ‘Labour’ from the smear ‘kaffir-loving’, had cooked their own goose, they had sunk themselves forever, because of the label: white trade unionist.

Meanwhile, the Conservative Party, which ran this country and had done for years, after watching, presumably with delight, the party of its formidable opponents destroy itself over a principle, waited till the dust settled and calmly announced that they were forming an African group. No one left that party on account of this revolutionary behaviour. On the contrary, it was hardly noticed.

To repeat, some people can do things other people can not do.

At any rate, the great battle which had split a major party and ruined half a dozen careers, had left this small spoil on the field—an African group.

For some time it had ceased to exist, since the wing of the Party which supported it had practically collapsed.

Then Mrs Van, surveying a scene on which half a dozen groups came into existence, had short embattled lives, then faded out, while the mysterious Mr Zlentli still remained invisible, decided that she would make
their
group do something useful.

What?

First had to be asked, what did the Africans most lack?

Clearly—it was perfectly clear to Mrs Van—it was self-confidence. There could be no doubt about it. The Africans of this Colony, physically shattered, their armies destroyed, their tribes scattered, had none of the self-confidence and pride of the countries up North which had never been conquered.

Not only had they been pulverized in battle, fifty, sixty years before, but since then they had been governed by people who reviled them from dawn to dusk. They could not pick up a newspaper without being told how ignorant they were, how stupid, how backward. Clearly the first task of their well-wishers was, as Mrs Van put it (if only privately), to ‘cheer them up’.

And how to do this? Well, no doubt about that either! Obviously, in order to fill black heads and hearts with confidence, all one had to do was to tell them the history of Europe and America over the last hundred years. No black
nation could ever be (Mrs Van hoped) as stupid, blood-thirsty, murderous, treacherous and short-sighted as any white nation in the world, and therefore did Mrs Van draft out a course of twenty or so lectures covering ‘from the Industrial Revolution to the Second World War’. She then summoned Mr Matushi, as spokesman of the group, to ask if he approved.

Mr Matushi, smiling gently as—it seemed—he always would, pointed out that while he in no way wished to upset their good friend Mrs Van, what the Africans really needed was instruction on how to get rid of the present white Government, by (a) fair means or (b) foul means. Could she not see her way to providing courses in revolutionary methods?

Mrs Van said: ‘But if my information is correct, some of you are already receiving such instruction. Is it not the case that Solly Cohen is running a study group on these lines? And how about your Mr Zlentli?’

‘He is not
my
Mr Zlentli!’

She smiled at him, he smiled at her. Then he politely asked why Mrs Van was so anxious to teach them history.

Mrs Van invited him to bring a group of his friends to discuss this.

These men sat listening patiently while she explained: ‘My dear Sirs, you are all suffering from a really fatal political handicap. You believe in your hearts, you believe the propaganda of your enemies. Now, if you knew anything about recent European history (and of course it isn’t your fault that you don’t, your schools being what they are) then every time a white man told you you weren’t fit to govern, you’d simply howl with laughter.’

These remarks, having gained the sympathetic smiles she had designed them to earn, she continued, in a different voice: ‘And besides, my dear friends, you will find it useful to know what your own futures, under independence, will be unless you are very careful indeed. Do we believe that white races, black races, are more or less intelligent than each other? We do not. But I’ve a suspicion that you think when you get self-government you’ll be more intelligent
than Europeans? Well, you won’t be. I, personally, am fighting for your independence because I believe you have the inalienable right to be as cruel and as stupid as we are.’

So Mrs Van, with a calm nod and a smile. They laughed, of course. But these remarks were repeated. And repeated. Some people didn’t laugh. Such views were in advance of their time—as the saying goes. Much more tactful neither to say such things nor—better still—to think them. Mrs Van, whose career had been ruined—she did not regret it—by the scandal over the African group, perhaps thought she had nothing to lose and could say what she pleased. But it is possible that she was tired, and perhaps sickened by a lifetime’s battle with stupidity, and so there was self-indulgence in saying such things. At any rate, words which at the time made her friends smile, later had repercussions.

Meanwhile, the twenty or so lectures on white history were not given. The Africans conferred, said they agreed it would be a help to know more history, but what about their own? Mrs Van searched around, made enquiries, wrote to universities, but had to confess that the Africans (officially) had no history yet. It was all there, but scattered over the world in old records and archives and bills of sale. There was no single book, or even a pamphlet, in existence in 1946 which Mrs Van might order and make the basis of a study group on the ‘History of Africa before the coming of the white man’.

The Africans conferred again and suggested it might be a help to know the history of South Africa. Was it possible, for instance, that the Nationalists could take power? Of course everyone said it was impossible, they knew that. The world would not tolerate such extremist views—1946 this was, and the sort of people who wrote leaders for newspapers were saying that the world would never again stand for extremist governments. Yes, they understood, the Africans said, that they had nothing to fear, for one thing that liberal country Britain would not allow it, but suppose the Nationalists
did
take power, what might happen to this country, which was so close to South Africa in spirit, not to mention in history?

This demand was met much more easily than at first seemed likely. Here was Johnny Lindsay, who had first been in South Africa at the age of eighteen. He had fought in the Boer War (which in fact now filled him with shame and remorse) and had taken part in every industrial battle in South Africa until the Great Strike of 1922. He undertook to give lectures. The trouble was, he did not have enough breath to talk. For the first lecture—on the stupid brutality of the Boer War—he had sat up in bed, an old coat flung around his shoulders, the oxygen tank standing close to him, and he had wheezed out sentence after sentence while his eyes filled with humiliated tears and his audience of half a hundred black people—sitting on the floor, the bed, anywhere they could find a place—listened in sympathetic silence. It occurred, first to Mrs Van, but then to Johnny, who pointed it out himself, that when he died, he would take with him day-to-day memories of a history still unwritten. What could be more extraordinary, more paradoxical, more violent, than the history of the Rand? They called in a shorthand writer, but Johnny could not talk: it was too late, he did not have enough breath for more than half a sentence at a time.

He had to write it—a pity, since his way of writing had none of the lively quality of his speech. When he had finished an episode, he gave it to Martha. She typed it, and was paid for doing so by some Foundation alerted by Mrs Van.

So it was Martha who, every week, sat by the old man’s side and read out what he had written during the week. He would amend, alter, add, as she read—as far as his breath would allow.

On a certain Wednesday evening in winter, the tiny room in the Coloured Quarter was filled with men, mostly Africans. There was a lot of coughing, for people were not warmly enough dressed, nor did they eat enough. Behind them, children of the Quarter hung about on the veranda, listening. As a backdrop stood the winter’s sky, in a solid cold glitter.

Johnny was propped up on pillows. He was very ill that
night. Martha brought out one sentence after another, more and more slowly, because she had to raise her voice against the harsh irregular breathing. But no one liked to suggest that he should clip the oxygen tube to his face before them all.

Flora was not in the room. Mrs Van had said: ‘I think Flora’s glad of an evening off nursing sometimes.’ But it had become known that Flora had said: ‘I don’t see why everyone should work a sick man to his grave.’

Mrs Van had explained that Johnny was probably only still alive in order to give up, week by week, the precious accumulation of his memories, before it was too late. At least, that is certainly how she, Mrs Van, would feel. ‘It takes all sorts to make a world,’ said Flora, and took herself off.

For the first time people were looking at Flora, and seeing a pretty, middle-aged woman of conventional South African upbringing who had been living with the old agitator from the Rand—presumably for love, since they were not married—for years; and who had accepted, among other things, that she should cook for, act hostess to, sit down at table with, black men, black women. What had she thought of it all? She did not say, but went to the pictures on Wednesdays.

She was a widow and had met Johnny when he was a vigorous man with lungs that ‘played him up sometimes’.

Behind the bed sat Mrs Van, knitting a garment for a grandchild. Across the bed from Martha sat Athen, attentive to every movement, every breath, of Johnny Lindsay, whom he revered, although as he said: ‘In my country he would be a class enemy, he’s a social democrat—but Matty, he’s a good man and he has given his life for the workers, according to his lights.’

Athen wore his elegant pale suit, and was suffering with the suffering of the old man, who sat half-suffocated, his chest heaving.

Martha read: ‘The Strike Committee shifted its headquarters from Benoni to Johannesburg. At the same time the Government was arming the terrified bourgeoisie into bands
of special constables. Troops were still arriving armed to the teeth, with their horses ready saddled in open trucks. Guns were unlimbered in the open spaces. A few of the strikers began coming into the central part of Johannesburg, and along with them crowds of sightseers. All business came to a stop, and armed patrols rode through the streets dispersing groups of people. The general mood of the public was one of anger and bitterness. The mere presence of the troops was sullenly resented, and understood as a move to overawe the town.’