None to Accompany Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

background of white students, difficult to attain for the black students who satisfied entrance standards nominally but came from township schools where boycotts were their history thesis,running battles with the police their epic poetry, and economic theory that of a home where there wasn’t enough money for bus fare, let alone books. So what was the difference, whichever way a failed sculptor might earn a living?
    In some blessed peaceful country, existing far away, an obvious moral contradiction in the activities of a man and woman might destroy the respect that goes with love. But here, for these two, while the great lie prevailed, it was part of a shackle of common experience of what was wrong but aleatory, could not be escaped. They were scarcely aware of its chafing.
    When Oupa had driven two or three kilometres from the Odendaal place the little party from the Foundation stopped on a side road for tea under a tree. Mrs Stark always took along on such trips a flask and a packet of biscuits, sugar in a jar, and a stack of plastic cups. Most welcome, the Odensville man said several times, sitting with his knees neatly together, on the grass. Young Oupa crunched one biscuit after another and every now and then, irresistibly, shook his head and laughed on a full mouth at the encounter they had left behind them. —I know that man. Yoh-yoh! I know him! That kind from the Island, warders just like him. There was one commandant—stood there like a bull in front of you when you came up for interrogation. Never spoke himself, let the other one question you and rough you up, but just standing there he was in charge. If he hadn’t been there, they couldn’t have done the things they did to you. And every time I thought, now it’s coming, now he’s going to start in on me, too. Yrr-ah, man. But he didn’t need to, he just had to be
there
.—
    Mrs Stark ran her fingers through her hair, a commonplace sparrow ruffling its feathers, and yawned, the yawn turning intoa smile, the pleasure she always took in the young man’s ebullience, his awesome way of dealing with his terrible experiences in the indiscriminate narrative style in which he would gossip of something pleasant or funny. The soft red road was empty except for a distant stick-figure zigzagging on a bicycle just below the horizon. The tea was hot and sweet. Beyond a barbed-wire fence where wispy beards of sheep’s wool were caught, veld grasses and weeds streaked in undulations of green woven to bronze and rust where a declivity in the ground had been swampy in summer. Black-and-white plover flung themselves up out of the grass as if they had been thrown, crying out on a single note at human presence. After the battering of responses and emotions in the exchange with the farmer, the irritation and exasperation repressed—and who knows, neither Mrs Stark nor Oupa, what else the Odensville man was experiencing?—calm and quiet fell upon the three as a common bond. After this one unremarkable manifestation of that conflict which rang and babbled about them, in them, a constant garbling of their different lives— suddenly the swallows of hot sweet tea were their only awareness. The paper-flutter of white egrets lifting the sky, the gauzy sleeves of water trailing from irrigation faucets in a vast field of something barely there, barely green; the three rested on the land: this was what it was, not a wrangle in a cross-fire of saliva on a stoep, not folders of documents citing deed, claim and proclamation in the files of a Legal Foundation. Oupa wandered off to pee behind a tree. Mrs Stark, unconcerned about the dignity of her maturity, climbed through the spiky fence with the skill of one used to improvise and found a bush for herself. As she squatted there so privately, the flit of insects in the sun above her head made her drowsy, as if they were some pleasant drug taking aural effect. In an instant measured by the flick