â he loves to give me a concise explanation â âit exists in relation to the early Communist world â shall we call it. Defining one, you assume the existence of the other. So both are part of a total historical phenomenon.â
I poured him another drink because I wanted him to go, and although he wanted to go, he accepted it. âDid you work all afternoon? Or did you really sleep?â
But I knew that he had worked; he gave the admission of a dry, dazed half-smile, something that came from the room where heâd been shut up among documents, as a monk, who during his novitiate still makes some sorties into the life outside, is claimed by the silence of the cell that has never really relinquished him. Even the Friday night love-making had not made Graham sleepy in the afternoon; in that room of his, he wrote and intoned into the dictaphone, alone with his own voice. Iâve heard it sometimes from outside the door; like someone sending up prayer.
I mentioned Iâd noticed that the arrow-and-spear sign was still on the walls of the viaduct near the Home.
âIâm not surprised. I think there are a few new ones round the town, too. Somebodyâs brave. Or foolhardy.â He told me last week that a young white girl got eighteen months for painting the same symbol; but of course in the Cape black men and women are getting three years for offences like giving ten bobsâ worth of petrol for a car driven by an African National Congress member.
âDâyou think itâs all right, using that spear thing? I mean, when you think who it was who had the original idea.â It came out in a political trial not long ago that this particular symbol of resistance was the invention of a police
agent provocateur
and spy. Iâd have thought theyâd want to find another symbol.
He laughed. âI donât suppose the motives of the inventorâve much to do with it. After all, look at advertising agencies â do you think the people who coin the selling catchword believe in what theyâre doing?â
âYes, I suppose so. But itâs queer. A queer situation. I mean one could never think it would be like that.â
We were silent for a moment; he was, so to speak, considerately bare-headed in these pauses in which the thought of Max was present. There was nothingto say about Max, but now and then, like the silent thin spread of spent water coming up to touch your feet on a dark beach at night, his death or his life came in, and a commonplace remark turned up reference to him. Graham asked, âThe flowers arrive for your grandmother all right?â I told him how they were kept outside the door; and how she had cried out when she saw a figure in the doorway.
âItâs natural to be afraid of death.â Just as if he were advising a dose of Syrup of Figs for Bobo (one of the fatherly gestures he sometimes boldly makes).
âMaybe. But sheâs never had to put up with whatâs natural. Neither grey hairs nor cold weather. Itâs true â until two or three years ago, when she became senile, she hadnât lived through a winter in fifteen years â she flew from winter in England to the summer here, and from winter here to summer in England. But for this, now, nothing helps.â
âLike the common cold,â he said, standing up suddenly and looking down at me; almost amusedly, almost bored, accusingly. So he dismisses a conversation, or makes a decision. âCan you take me now?â But he doesnât understand. Since you have to die you ought to be provided with a perfectly ordinary sense of having had your fill. A mechanism like that which controls other appetites. You ought to know when youâve had enough â like the feeling at the end of a meal. As simple and ordinary as that.
I drove him home. His name is on the beautifully polished bronze plate on the gateway and a wrought-iron lantern is turned on by the
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