she believed the butcher’s boast that the animal had been playing in the Midlands on Sunday. The meat reminded her of a polony. In Paris their butcher and his apprentice had been professionals, as impeccable in their aprons and unswerving in their opinions as doctors and lawyers. They didn’t say too much. Whereas you could rely on a Durban butcher, with his smudged red hands, to patter on, never noticing that the customer across the plywood counter wasn’t smiling.
Ann put on the oven to heat. She washed the lamb under the tap, turning it around to clean the entire leg. Then it was dried with a paper towel, stretched out on the cutting board to be hammered flat, and rubbed with salt and rosemary she took from the kitchen window. She waited for the oven to reach two hundred. The cleaned scent of the meat and the clatter of the water in the sink, the branches of rosemary, the dogs finding each other’s ears in the evening, the children being called indoors, servants standing on the road for the Indian bus, and the rising heat of the oven against the remaining heat of the day made her aware of her own happiness. This happiness was like the sea wind when the temperature of the water and land reversed and everything was free in new darkness.
She put the radio on. It was Radio Port Natal, playing translated copies of American pop music, a programme that commenced when the English service ended for the day. The voice of the announcer was as thick as gravel. It was odd that she could be happy when she had been married twice to two such different men, odder still that she had cried to leave Gert although she had made the decision to get a divorce. Ann saw that she wouldn’t cry for a minute if she and Neil should separate, and yet she was closer to him than she had been to Gert by a factor of a thousand. That was her contradiction.
The contradiction was Neil’s all-purpose explanation. This country was in a state of contradiction, starting with an economy which made many rich and far too many poor. The individual was also in contradiction between his heart and his mind, his angel and his demon. Anywhere there was life, there was contradiction.
It was a contradiction in which Ann found herself, settling the lamb into the roasting pan, trying not to burn her hands, while wishing for the end of her marriage. She would rather see her second divorce decree on the luxury paper the solicitors employed than find Nadia in the house again. She would give her husband to Nadia in gift-wrap to keep from having to look into her long mouth for one minute longer.
Did she have anything to worry about? The students at Howard College, along with the members of the Free University, idealised her husband. In his thirties, he was the local equivalent of a Sartre, a king of the revolution. There were no queens. While there were women overseas who smoked in mini-skirts, spoke openly about abortions, bombed aeroplanes, it was also true that heroic men like Sartre and Che Guevara assumed the same rights over women as kings and millionaires.
One afternoon in Paris, for example, Jean-Paul Sartre had made a pass at her while she was slicing a ham on the dining table, using the other hand to keep it in place. Neil had just run down the stairs to find a tin of mustard. Sartre had been examining Neil’s poor student library, holding the volumes of Kojève and Heidegger in his hands and making comments about individual passages which he read out to her in excited French. He found his way closer to the table, set the books on the edge, advised her on the best cutting procedure, and, without moving his wall eye from the direction of the ham, established his astonishingly strong, bony, and discoloured hand on Ann’s thigh. Yet it seemed to interest him less than the texture and fineness of each slice she carved. Ann removed the philosopher’s hand, once she understood what was happening, set his plate on the opposite side of the table, and allowed him to continue examining the bookshelves, where, after a minute of displeasure with her, he was pleased to find several editions of his own books.
Ann kept her distance from Neil’s supervisor for the remainder of their time in France. He treated her as if she had let him down. He looked disappointedly in her direction at gatherings, although his mistress and his wife were present as well, and then, as if to punish her, monopolised her husband’s attention. She could still summon the memory of Sartre’s touch, too hot and yet too cold at the same time.
It had taken Ann a fortnight to tell Neil. He hadn’t been nearly as exercised by her story as she expected. She didn’t want him to fight with Sartre and lose the work he had done on his dissertation. He never took up the matter with his professor. It wasn’t something that mattered to him. Neil had the strength of his convictions. It made him inhuman in certain respects. Gert would have hit the man.
The lamb had begun to sizzle. Ann opened the door and admired it, watching the creepers of flame rise and fall at the back of the oven, and the burned brown crust appearing along the sides. The kitchen was warm with the smell of the meat. She rinsed a handful of mint leaves, tore them up, and mixed them into a pat of Crown butter. Outside it rained out of a clear sky, pouring for ten minutes, chattering on the roof.
She stood at the window to watch the dark rain, which disappeared to reveal lines of white and blue stars across the heavens. On the far side of the harbour, where the seaside lights hadn’t yet been turned on, she thought she saw the flash of a shooting star. You didn’t often see them so close to sea level.
The lamb was done long before Neil returned, along with an amount of potatoes, carrots, and turnips, which Ann placed out on the table under upturned dishes where the entering members of the Free University came to admire them.
Every two or three minutes somebody rang the bell and she would go and escort them to the sitting room, where they waited for the session to begin, talking quietly among themselves or coming to ask her if they could use the telephone for some emergency. She didn’t mind the telephone bills, although she didn’t show them to Neil either. He would have been shocked, but then, like many people who were old-fashioned at heart, he couldn’t adjust to changes in the value of money. The rand was not as stable as the pound. It was a harbinger of the metric system.
The Free University was open to anybody who wanted to expand his understanding, from government workers and municipal clerks to students from the Philosophy Department and others from Black Consciousness groups.
No register was taken. Often, several Anglican clergymen arrived, both black and white. They had asked the permission of their bishop to attend. There were some young photographers who had started to document the townships, taking pictures of the magistrates’ courts and the municipal beer halls, as well as following the Black Marias in their patrols around the giant locations of Umlazi and KwaMashu. There was a young man, Lelo, who worked as a security guard at the petrol refinery on the Bluff and made it to their house by taking three different buses, and John Mantis, who wrote poetry and drew cartoons for the newspapers and collected books and pamphlets concerning freemasonry and demonology.
Communists and liberals refused to participate. Nevertheless, Neil had recruited a number of workers and strike leaders from the councils that had appeared on the Durban docks and in the textiles factories.
Some participants in the Free University had become friends. Archie Msimang, in his late fifties, had manners as impeccable as any of the Hunters’. Employed as a machinist in a workshop in Pinetown, Archie was the product of a former mission school, a barrel of a man coming to her shoulder, almost purple on his large and expressive countenance. His way of speaking, his way of halting halfway through a sentence to survey it to the end, reminded her of the priest who officiated over her wedding to Neil.
The friendship went in both directions. Archie came to consult with Neil on a matter that had nothing to do with the Free University, some issue to do with his pass book or opening a savings account, but ended up sitting in the kitchen with Ann and talking, slowly and courteously, about his dilemmas until the afternoon vanished from the windows. She knew about the wife who had died suddenly on Boxing Day, his brother who left the country after Sharpeville and had never been heard of again, the woman he had begun to court who worked behind the counter of the bp garage.
Ann
