15. HEROES AND BLOOD

“The cop who saw you, you’re certain he doesn’t know your names?” Standing in the doorway in his double-breasted suit and pale-yellow tie, Rusty looked rather dashing. He also looked tired.

“Yes, quite certain.”

“But he could pick you out of a lineup?”

Henry winced. “Yes. Hopefully he didn’t call in the licence plate.”

Sarah appeared, gave Rusty a kiss hello, and asked after Hilda. Glenn followed them into the living room, then tugged Rusty towards his room to show him his model airplanes and drawings. When Henry knocked on the door, Rusty commended the precision of Glenn’s drawings and mussed the boy’s hair before following his father downstairs to the study.

They’d received word from a source, Rusty said. Ravi had been arrested. That’s all he knew. Henry explained the situation with Yusuf. Their fate may be in the hands of the car’s owner who was, Yusuf said, not a sympathiser but a good bloke. Yusuf hadn’t phoned, so presumably the owner hadn’t contacted him. And maybe that meant the police hadn’t contacted the owner—and maybe it didn’t. Henry had worried himself sick about this until he’d simply given up, exhausted by his anxieties about probability and luck, fate and God and kismet and grace.

“Not very much you can do,” Rusty said. “Lie low, keep away from everyone for a while. No meetings, no contact.”

“Sure. Of course.” It was almost a relief to be told to stay away.

Rusty touched Henry’s shoulder, and they walked to the window.

“Listen, if they’d connected you with Ravi or traced the car, you’d be in jail by now.”

For the most part, Blood River Day had been a success, Rusty said. Umkhonto had blown up an electrical substation in New Brighton, telephone lines in Port Elizabeth, a Bantu administration office in Alice, two police stations, railway lines, a bus depot. Five explosions in Port Elizabeth alone. Only two arrests: Rex Luphondwana, who had thrown the petrol bomb in Alice—and Ravi.

“Stay for some supper, Rusty?”

“I’m afraid I can’t. Have to get going,” he said, standing up.

“Our love to Hilda.”

That evening the fear and self-recrimination returned. Henry sat alone, couldn’t even play with Glenn, and cursed himself for his stupidity, or ineptitude, or hubris. Who was he kidding? He’d made the same mistake every petty criminal makes: I won’t get caught, not this time. Also something like shame. Rusty was soldiering on. Govan and Slovo, too. They all were. Prison, refugeedom, or freedom: those were the options. Courage wasn’t the absence of fear, Nelson said, but the triumph over it. Henry had read Emerson: A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is brave five minutes longer. Henry felt very ordinary.

HE COULDN’T sleep. Woke up thrashing, grinding his teeth. Watched Sarah beside him, envied her serene sleep, her body warm and thick with it. Ever since Pietermaritzburg, he hadn’t been able to sleep through the night. Rusty was right, of course. There’d been nothing on Ravi’s person and he hadn’t talked. Yusuf would keep the car out of circulation a few more days—the best he could do—in case the police were looking for it. The beat cop probably hadn’t filed a report, otherwise he’d have been arrested by now. But still, Henry didn’t feel safe. Just because they hadn’t found anything yet didn’t mean they wouldn’t. A cop had seen him. With paraffin, cash, a fake passport, Vorster’s programme. Maybe the money had been enough to buy his silence. Or maybe they’d already pieced things together and were just waiting, watching him, to see if he might lead them to a bigger fish. He couldn’t discuss things on the phone with anyone. Sarah knew some of it, and guessed from his behaviour that something had gone wrong. She was angry at him for doing whatever it was that he couldn’t tell her, he could sense that. But she’d put her arms around him and stroked his hair. Now, in the middle of the night, he wanted to tell her everything, but there was no point. There would only be more for her to deny or lie about if the police ever questioned her. And if they came for him? He wanted to be ready. He lay awake and stared at the dark outlines of trees in the grey-black sky.

A FEW days later, Rusty sent a note to Henry’s office, buried inside a legal document. Ravi had taken poison in his prison cell. Henry spent the next hour staring at his desk, and most of the afternoon in the office toilet, retching.

Dunningham stopped by that evening. Made a big show of returning a tennis racquet he’d borrowed. They walked in the garden, and Dunningham told him what he’d learned from their police contact via Slovo. Ravi had arrived as planned, had navigated his way through the crowded high street. When Vorster’s retinue turned left into Klip Street, Ravi ran across the road to follow them. That’s when a policeman noticed him. At the intersection, the two men collided, and when Ravi fell, the cop saw his holster and gun.

That night, Henry kissed Sarah and held her tight and told her that he loved her. Later, he tiptoed into Glenn’s room where the boy lay sleeping, wiry legs outspread, arms akimbo. Henry leaned over and kissed his head, felt the hot short breaths on his cheek. He backed out slowly, and as he stood in the doorway watching his son sleep, tears welled in his eyes.

THE POLICE didn’t knock on the door the next day. Or the next. Life went on. The Struggle ate its way into his legal work, with the consent, if not blessing, of Briggs, Fleming, and Pfister. One day, over lunch on Simmons Street, Duncan Callan talked sotto voce about a new case. Bespectacled, brilliant, and an old friend, Callan worked mainly on a number of pro bono cases for black clients. The defendant had been banned, ostensibly because he was in the ANC and a member of the Communist Party, but in truth because of something that he had published in Drum magazine about an incident in one of the townships where police had assaulted and shot people attending a funeral. One man’s head was smashed so violently that his brain oozed with the blood onto the road. Henry listened to Duncan’s concise summary of the case’s merits.

They ate veal, drank a glass of red wine. A bourgeois lunch for revolutionaries, Henry thought. The bourgeoisie had been corrupted by a government whose weaponry included capitalism and inertia, and if those didn’t work, there was a massive, repressive police force and secret service. The revolution would wage a war on people’s souls. Then power would pass from one hand to another, from a fascist hand to the people’s hand, white capital to the working class. In secret meetings of the underground Communist Party, they had discussed Lenin’s rules for revolution. A mass organisation that could communicate with the workers, coordinate nationwide activities, unite all social strata and maintain unity and secrecy, while raising money and mobilising foreign governments. No mean feat. Oliver Tambo was their one-man band abroad. It was impossible to tell if the majority of the country was in fact on their side, if contact and communication had been established, if the rest of the world would bother at all. How could they win the war when they were too scared to mention Lenin’s name in a restaurant? This had long been Sarah’s fear—the sheer might of the enemy. They had jails, a police force, a subservient justice system. They had laws and informants and tear gas and torture. They had guns.

They talked some more about the case. Henry told his friend that he thought it was a good case, a winnable case. Duncan smiled, took off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes. “They keep inventing new laws and cutting the balls off the old ones. They’ll probably ban Drum next, then all of this will change.”

They were having their coffee, the restaurant half empty, when Duncan leaned forward. “What about you? I won’t be called upon to act on your behalf, will I?”

“Me? No, I’m fine.”

Duncan’s eyes registered a flicker of doubt, or fear.

Henry paused, contemplated his coffee cup. The searing truth flashed only for a moment, like now, when he considered what it might mean to escape, to run from a far more powerful foe—or to lose, to get caught. He had a burning desire to know how it would end, but knew that this would be denied him. Could he endure prison? He didn’t think so. What did it feel like to hang? He was gripped by an intense sadness, and felt suddenly old, like someone in a science fiction movie, zap-pow, and they landed in the future. He’d seen Invaders from Mars just a few weeks before. The work at the plant is secret. We have orders to report anything unusual.

HENRY WORKED on the trial with Duncan. He enjoyed the research, poring over past cases, reading about banning laws and freedom of information, the new laws that gave the Prime Minister sweeping new powers. But after about two weeks the trial was postponed because of another appeal before the Supreme Court. No way of telling whether the postponement was legally sound or the result of a crumbling legal system.

Summertime. Evening swims. After work, Henry kicked the soccer ball with Glenn. Ndimande watered the garden and mowed the lawn. Sarah played bridge on Tuesdays. Henry drank more than he used to. They went to dinner parties, weekend bring and braais—friends around the pool, cold beer, and plates of sizzling boerewors. Work went on. Henry drafted briefs and contracts, then revised, revised, revised. He looked around, saw others his age blithely content, making their way in the world. But family, security, kipper and eggs for breakfast, scotch and soda in the evening were not enough for Henry.

Days passed by, and still he wasn’t arrested. He got dressed, ate breakfast, and drove to work. And the days became weeks and Henry grew more assured. He started sleeping better. The Dunninghams threw a big New Year’s party. Brian Pfister said 1962 was a good year for Claret—he’d bought six cases of Bordeaux futures. Weeks went by. And then it was a month. Every precaution had been taken. For all the police knew, Ravi had acted alone. Henry was just beginning to believe his luck, to believe Sarah, when one morning the doorbell rang, and two policemen were standing outside.