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Sampson’s modesty, urging him on.
    â€˜Well, if the book should—could—might have been somehow . . .’ Dismissing bent tilt of head.
    Of course, who knows if hindsight’s seeing it reprinted, best-selling. There’s no use for royalties anyway. No tariff for the Chinese lunch.
    Now it’s Susan who presses. ‘So what’re you up to.’
    Maybe he’s counting that Mandela will arrive soon, so he can add an afterword to his famous biography of the great man.
    â€˜Oh it’d be good to see you sometime at the tavern.’
    Tavern?
    Probably I’m the only one other than Sampson himself who knows that’s the South African politically correct term forwhat used to be black ghetto shebeens (old term second-hand from the Irish).
    Susan turns down her beautiful mouth generously shaped for disbelief and looks to Edward. The wells of his gaze send back from depths, reflection of shared intrigue.
    Anthony Sampson has some sort of bar.
    Did he add ‘my place’—that attractive British secretive mumble always half-audible. So that would explain the African dress. And yet make it more of a mystery to us (if, the dreamer, I’m not one of those summoned up, can be included in the dream).
    â€˜How long has this place been going?’ Susan again.
    Where?
    Where isn’t relevant. There’s no site, just as with the Chinese restaurant conjured up by Susan’s expectation of her arrival. (Couldn’t have been a place of my expectation of you.)
    How long?
    The African garment isn’t merely a comfortable choice for what might have been anticipated as an overheated New York–style restaurant. It is a ritual accoutrement, a professional robe. Anthony Sampson has spent some special kind of attention, since there is no measure by time, in induction as a sangoma.
    Sangoma.
What.
What
is that.
    I know it’s what’s commonly understood as a ‘witch doctor’, but that’s an imperio-colonialist term neither of Anthony’s companions would want to use, particularly not Edward, whose classic work
Orientalism
is certainly still running into many editions as evidence of the avatars of the old power phenomenon in guise under new names.
    Sampson’s ‘place’ is a shebeen which was part of his place inAfrica that was never vacated by him when he went back to England, as the Chinese restaurant is part of her place, never vacated in Susan’s New York. But the shebeen seems put to a different purpose; or rather carries in its transformation what really had existed there already. Sampson’s not one in a crowd and huddle that always made itself heard above the music in ‘The House of Truth’—ah, that was the name in the Sophia-town ‘slum’ of the white city, poetic in such claims for its venues. He’s not just one of the swallowers of a Big Mama’s concoction of beer-brandy-brakefluid, Godknowswhat, listening to, entering the joys, sorrows, moods defiant and despairing, brazenly alive, of men and women who made him a brother there.
    He has returned to this, to something of the world, from isolation in the bush of Somenowhere with knowledge to offer instead of, as bar proprietor, free drinks. The knowledge of the traditional healer. He serves the sangoma’s diagnoses of and alleviations of the sorrows, defiances and despairs that can’t be drowned or danced, sung away together.
    â€˜Oh a shrink!’
    Who would have thought Susan, savant of many variations of cultures, could be so amazed. The impact throws back her splendid head in laughter.
    At ‘Tony’s Place’, his extraordinary gifts as a journalist elevated to another sphere of inquiry, he guides with the third eye his bar patrons—wait a minute; his patients—to go after what’s behind their presented motives of other people, and what’s harmful behind the patient’s own. He dismisses: doesn’t make