Rage - Smith Wilbur - Страница 59
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'Until my work is done,' he replied, then his expression softened and he stroked her face. 'You knew that it must be so. I warned you that when you married me, you were marrying the struggle." 'You warned me,' she agreed in a husky whisper. 'But there'was no way that I could guess at the agony of your leaving." They rose early the following morning. Moses had acquired a secondhand Buick, old and _slbbvenJg.b.not toex.('itehntrs,* o_,- but one of Hendrick Tabaka's expert mechanics had overhauled the engine and tightened the suspension, leaving the exterior untouched.
In it they would return to Johannesburg.
Though the sun had not yet risen, the entire kraal was astir, and Victoria's sisters had prepared breakfast for them. After they had eaten came the hard part of taking leave of her family. She knelt before her father.
'Go in peace, my daughter,' he told her fondly. 'We will think of you often. Bring your sons to visit us." Victoria's mother wept and keened as though it were a funeral, not a wedding, and Victoria could not comfort her although she embraced her and protested her love and duty until the other daughters took her away.
Then there were all her stepmothers and her half-brothers and half-sisters, and the uncles and aunts and cousins who had come from the farthest reaches of Zululand. Victoria had to make her farewells to all of them, though some partings were more poignant than others. One of these was her goodbye to Joseph Dinizulu, her favourite of all her relatives. Although he was a half-brother and seven years younger than she was, a special bond had always existed between them. The two of them were the brightest and most gifted of their generation in the family, and because Joseph lived at Drake's Farm with one of the elder brothers, they had been able to continue their friendship.
However, Joseph would not be returning to the Witwatersrand.
He had written the entrance exams and been accepted by the exclusive multi-racial school, Waterford, in Swaziland, and Lady Anna Courtney would be paying his school fees. Ironically, this was the same school to which Hendrick Tabaka was sending his sons, Wellington and Raleigh. There would be opportunity for their rivalry to flourish.
'Promise me you will work hard, Joseph,' Vicky said. 'Learning makes a man strong." 'I will be strong,' Joseph assured her. The elation that Moses Gama's speech had aroused in him still persisted. 'Can I come and visit you and your husband, Vicky? He is a man, the kind of man I will want to be one day." Vicky told Moses what the child had said. They were alone in the old Buick, all the wedding gifts and Vicky's possessions filling the boot and piled in the back seat, and they were leaving that great littoral amphitheatre of Natal, going up over the tail of the Drakensberg range on to the high veld of the Transvaal.
'The children are the future,' Moses nodded, staring ahead at the steep blue serpent of road that climbed the escarpment, past the green hill of Majuba where the Boers had thrashed the British in the first of many battles with them. 'The old men are beyond hope. You saw them at the wedding, how they kicked and baulked like unbroken oxen when I tried to show them the way - but the children, ah the children!" He smiled. 'They are like fresh clean sheets of paper. You can write on them what you will. The old men are stone-hard and impermeable, but the children are clay, eager clay waiting for the shaping hands of the potter." He held up one of his hands. It was long and shapely, the hand of a surgeon or an artist and the palm was a delicate shade of pink, smooth and not calloused by labour.
'Children lack any sense of morality they are without fear, and death is beyond their conception. These are all things they acquire later, by the teaching of their elders. They make perfect soldiers for they question nothing and it takes no great physical strength to pull a trigger. If an enemy strikes them down they become the perfect martyrs. The bleeding corpse of a child strikes horror and remorse into even the hardest heart. Yes, the children are our key to the future. Your Christ knew it when he said "Suffer the little children to come unto me"." Victoria twisted on the leather bench seat of the Buick and stared at him.
'Your words are cruel and blasphemous,' she whispered, torn by her love for him and her instinctive rejection of what he had just said.
'And yet your reaction proves their truth,' he said.
'But --' she paused, reluctant to ask, and fearful to hear his reply, 'but are you saying that we should use our children --' She broke off, and an image of the paediatric section of the hospital came into her mind. She had spent the happiest months of all her training amongst the little ones. 'Are you suggesting that you would use the children in the front line of the struggle - as soldiers?" 'If a child cannot grow up a free man, then he might as well die as a child,' Moses Gama said. 'Victoria, you have heard me say this before. It is time now that you learn to believe it. There is nothing I would not do, no price I would not pay, for our victory. If I have to see a thousand little children dead so that a hundred thousand more may live to grow up free men, then for me the bargain is a fair one." Then, for the very first time in her life, Victoria Dinizulu was trul' afraid.
That night they stayed at Hendrick Tabaka's house in Drake's Farn Township, and it was well after midnight before they could go to th small bedroom that had been set aside for them because there were many who demanded Moses' attention, men from the Buffaloes and the Mineworkers' Union, a messenger from the council of the AN( and a dozen petitioners and supplicants who came quietly as jackak, to the lion when the word flashed through the township that Mose, Gama had returned.
At all these meetings Victoria was present, although she nevei spoke and sat quietly in a corner of the room. At first the men .were surprised and puzzled, darting quick glances across at her and reluctant to come to their business until Moses pressed them. None of them was accustomed to having women present when serious matters were discussed. However, none of them could bring themselves to protest, until the ANC messenger came into the room. He was invested with all the power and importance of the council he represented, and so he was the first to speak about Victoria's presence.
'There is a woman here,' he said.
'Yes,' Moses nodded. 'But not just a woman, she is my wife." 'It is not fitting,' said the messenger. 'It is not the custom. This is men's business." 'It is our purpose and our aim to tear down and burn the old customs and to build up the new. In that endeavour we will need the help of all our people. Not just the men, but the women and children also." There was a long silence while the messenger fidgeted under Moses' dark unrelenting stare.
'The woman can remain,' he capitulated at last.
'Yes,' Moses nodded. 'My wife will remain." Later in the darkness of their bedroom, in the narrowness of the single bed, Victoria pressed close to him, the soft plastic curves of her body conforming to his hardness and she said: 'You have honoured me by making me a part of your struggle.
Like the children, I want to be a soldier. I have thought about it and I have discovered what I can do." 'Tell me,' he invited.
'The women. I can organize the women. I can begin with the nurses of the hospital, and then the other women - all of them. We must take our part in the struggle beside the men." His arms tightened around her. 'You are a lioness,' he said. 'A beautiful Zulu lioness." 'I can feel your heartbeat,' she whispered, 'and my own heart beats in exact time to it." In the morning Moses drove her to the nurses' home at the hospital. She stood at the top of the steps and did not go into the building. He watched her in the rear-view mirror as he drove away and she was still standing there when he turned into the traffic, heading back towards Johannesburg and the suburb of Rivonia.
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