She was probably addressing some cross-eyed official, angry at having to be out here ‘in the dark’ at this ungodly hour, simply because a bunch of ‘kaffirs’ had refused to comply with the law. But she could have been calling out to Silas, her lover, her companion, the boy in whom she had vested her youthful dreams, her young and eager sensuality. But he was unable to rise, to go outside and show his solidarity, at the very least. Not only because his mother had come into his room and sat down on his bed, saying with her tense face and tear-filled eyes, ‘There is nothing you can do, this is not our fight,’ but also because of some vast weight that pressed down on him, an inertia, an indifference even.

For years, this memory, this humiliating recollection of his own powerlessness, his inexplicable sense of detachment, would be his guard against complacency, the smugness of minor success, the vanity of petty fame. But the paradox was that it became a source of comfort, the very unease that it created in his mind seemed to still other, more immediate fears and concerns confronting him.

He closed his eyes, trying to help the flow of sleep that the remedy of natural herbs sought to induce (these homeopathic concoctions always demand your active collusion!), weaving Dikeledi's voice into the murmur of sounds that always seemed to rise from the streets of Berea at this hour.

Part Two

Part Two

Confession

Since in order to speak, one must first listen, Learn to speak by listening.

Mevlana Celaleddin-i Rumi, Mesnevi

17

DAYS AFTER MICHAEL has finished reading Lydia's diary, an image endures in his mind, a man standing in the doorway, a man ‘looming’, bringing darkness to a bright summer day. But he dismisses this image as too dramatic. From what he remembers, the man is not tall enough to fill the doorway, yet he is sinister and menacing. These words suggest even greater drama, but they ring true: he remembers the effect the man had on his grandmother Angel.

Michael called her ‘Ouma Angel’ because ‘Angelina’ was too forbidding a name for his child's mind. Perhaps she also looked like an angel to him: smooth, greying hair, a face that broke up into kindly wrinkles when she smiled. He would call out to her – ‘Ouma Angel!’ – a sensual, delicate sound that filled their gloomy township house with sudden light, and she would hold him to her chest, taking secret pleasure at being called ‘Angel’, even if only by a child. Why could her parents not have had this inspiration, or a young man, wilder than Ali Ali with his quiet, insidious passion? Life might have been different had she been ‘Angel’ to someone when she was young. Now she only allowed Michael the liberty, everyone else was sternly reminded that she had a ‘proper’ name.