and pamphlets in the lounge. Neil tried to keep them on one shelf: Marx, Kropotkin, and the red-starred workerist journals, silkscreened in the Art Department, which had not been banned because nobody knew about their existence.
It was a routine. You heard from somebody that a raid was imminent. You put the chain on the door. If it was late and Paul was home from school, you called a friend to collect him. You checked the passports, drivers’ licences, the level of petrol in the car, and the spare money in the glove box, although you couldn’t imagine skipping the country. You made sure there was nothing that could be read on the typewriter ribbon and tore up the blue-and-gold sheets of carbon paper under the Olivetti. You couldn’t remember where you last left the cheque book with the column of subtractions along the side.
If there was time you called your sister in Schweizer-Reneke to give her advance notice to fetch Paul in case there was trouble, and then the other sister in Graaff-Reinet, the one who was married to a captain in the navy. You hadn’t heard her voice for so long that you wondered if she would recognise you. Your heart was in your mouth until she said your name and it was as if nothing had ever come between you.
You listened for the rapping on the door, which might come in the early hours of the morning, and tried to think if there was anything you had missed. You went upstairs again and checked the shelves and made sure that any entries in the telephone book had been scratched out. It was impossible to live without creating clues. Suddenly, as if a knife was buried in you up to the hilt, you yearned for life in an ordinary country, ordinary happiness and unhappiness.
Ann packed the material in one box and moved it into the kitchen. She sat down at the table and realised she had no idea what to do next. Neil usually took charge. Sometimes they heard an hour beforehand there was the chance of a raid. He would put the box of books in the trunk of his Valiant and take it to a friend’s garage, where it sheltered under a warped table-tennis table. Otherwise he would leave the car parked across from the gaudily lit hamburger restaurant and walk the ten minutes back down Essenwood Road, past the old-age homes, in full view of the racecourse. He would be in time to receive any policemen who did arrive.
For all the energy invested in the problem of their books, multiple visitations from the Security Branch had produced no great interest in the contents of Neil’s library. The major in charge might confiscate a volume or two, if it was prohibited, but it wasn’t his real concern. He wanted to know whether Neil had a certain individual’s current address, whether he had been in touch with any of the persons on a list that he read aloud, whether Neil had advance notice of the student council’s plans and could remember the members of a particular union or branch of the Black Sash, whether either of them knew the whereabouts of the son of the woman who did the neighbour’s laundry. It was only in a place like Paris where knowing the books someone loved, whether they followed Lévi-Strauss or Sartre, was the yardstick by which to measure them.
Ann was still thinking about what to do with the box when the telephone rang. She rushed to get it, picking up the black receiver, which was as cold as a hammer.
—Neil, I tried to call you at the department.
—You heard about the library? I had to go to the bank to make bail arrangements for some of the students. It’s been a tough day.
She wanted to tell him that the day could only improve. It might even turn into a day like the one, five years before in a jeweller’s shop in Rome, on a holiday subsidised by her mother-in-law, when Neil settled an off-white pearl necklace around her neck, running his fingers around her collarbone until Ann believed she would faint.
—Nadia was here when I came back. She told me about the demonstration. She thought that we were about to get a visit here from our friends. Before that I was busy with Edward Lavigne. Now I am trying to think of what to do about some of the books. Why didn’t you let me know, Neil?
Ann remembered, a minute too late, that the call was likely to be recorded. It was an impossible situation. She couldn’t live her entire life in code. They didn’t care about the books.
—You know everything I know.
—Then why do I hear it from Nadia?
—Ann, how could I predict any of this?
—You couldn’t.
Nothing could be foreseen. Unpredictability was a force to be reckoned with. It was no less relentless than the Special Branch. There was no place in Durban for extravagant jewellery or listening to music. Ann felt that the veneer furniture they bought at Joshua Doore, on a hire-purchase plan, and the lines of brown-brick warehouses along Umbilo Road proved something dismal about their own state. It would be an offence to try to live better. What had been attractive in Paris was twice as expensive here, not at all beautiful, in this context, but repulsive. A gullwing Mercedes was ravishing on a street in Rome but abhorrent over here.
On occasion Ann thought that she would die at the hands of her thousand worries. There was hardly the space to be taken up with one when another was knocking and then another and another. They were soon hammering out any other idea that might have been in her head. Neil was more efficient. He put out of his mind anything that could not be mitigated.
—You’re making a fuss out of nothing, Ann. I sent Nadia to the house to complete some work. If you want, I will ask her to return the key tomorrow. Does that suit you?
—And come home now, please.
—I want to hear about Edward Lavigne.
—When you get here.
Despite the suspicion that it was a false alarm Ann took the box of books out of the house. In a section of the outside wall, adjoining the Mackenzie place, was a garden cupboard. She opened it to reveal the neat heaps of tools, stiffening green coils of the hose, a jam jar filled with a gravy of snail poison, and a shovel.
She put the box under the hosepipe, which was heavy to lift. It would do nothing to keep the books away from the Special Branch. If they wanted to confiscate Neil’s contraband they would be sure to look outside and in the trunk of the car and at the bottom of their suitcases. And where would they put everything they had confiscated? One day, under the new government, which was coming as surely as the day, people would use this library of everything that had once been forbidden.
The house was old by Durban standards. Over time it had developed a sound and structure of its own. It had a good position at the top of the Berea. It had been put up by a sugar baron for the use of his manager, a man who promptly contracted yellow fever on the ship from Lourenço Marques. The place closest to it, in Ann’s opinion, was the house in Amiens, in the French countryside, to which they had been invited by Neil’s cousin, a baronet expatriated from the United Kingdom.
The baronet drove at reckless speed along the flower-lined roads, kept the two of them in residence for a fortnight when Neil wanted to return to his dissertation in Paris, and subsisted on pigs’ knuckles and luckless rabbits which tasted of gunpowder, litres of red wine, and, most memorably, the Atlantic lobsters, whose speckled green brains he grimly but proudly beat into a sauce. The Amiens house had been calm, undecorated, and filled with lengths of sunshine.
Ann wanted to hear Paul’s voice. However, they wouldn’t connect her to Newnham House if she called at this hour. You could telephone your son at school between eight and nine in the evening on a week night, or between three and six on a Saturday afternoon when the sports teams had finished their matches.
Ann didn’t know which person she would have to battle next. She went on with dinner. The leg of lamb came out of the refrigerator. It was hardly colder than when she bought
