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traded experiences of their leisure-time diversions. Pauline belonged to a book club and took up silk-screen printing in private recognition that this was the limit of the talent as a painter she once believed she had. What an irony one of her sons should have ended up an expert in an industrial paint factory as his first career—her sense of this wasn’t seen by her husband who had been impressed by her daubs when they met, part of his falling for her, as the expression went in those days; her wry, bright irony in respect of many circumstances perhaps comes from the Jewish side she brought to the marriage. Somehow paid her due to what she was, always would be, by the odd obeisance of her sons. Alan was the only one of their children who turned out to have any bent for the arts. In the circles in which she and Andrew move round accepted ideas, there was one that there was a predilection among men with ambition in the arts to become homosexuals, expressed in the usual epithets, Queens, Moffies. Did what had become Alan’s sexual choice along with his passion for poetry come from her blood. He had suffered for it, his worldly mother was his confidante, she knew the doors that had slammed on him because he was gay—what an irony (again) that misnomer was, no gaiety in being sneered at and despised. But what a great result of whatever his brother Steven had done to bring about a revolution—it hadn’t only freed the blacks, now it had given the same Constitutional rights in legal recognition that men like Alan, who love other men, are entitled to! She knew too well this was a—what’s the word—reductionist view of what freedom means, but it’s her minority experience of it, as a white privileged by oppression of the others in the too-close past. Andrew, his father, had accepted that this son among his sons made ‘love’ to men (yes, entering the place of shit) a version of sexual desire; he couldn’t understand how this chosen deprivation of the love of women, the place for perfect consummation in their lovely bodies, could come about. He loved his son and continued to show it, and did not let appear what he felt on his son’s behalf. Not disgust: regret. He could not go so far as behaving exceptionally welcoming to Alan’s lovers, as Pauline did, as if they were the same as the other sons’ wives, the producers of grandchildren. Hard for him to dictate to himself: so long as he’s happy.

 
    Steve brought students to the house. There would be peanuts and cartons of fruit juice dumped on the small terrace for hospitality, although they might have preferred beer and good pot. These were not seminars, their prof (as they called him although he was still only a senior lecturer) invited them as young friends. That most of them were in what used to be called the ‘non’ category, non-European: African Black, African Indian, African-God-knows-mixture-white, something new to the science faculty at the university, as company was nothing new to Jabu and him as it was for many who might receive them in their homes as people other than servants. Struggle had no non-categories among identities of comrades. There was no sense of inadequacy of a white comrade in that he didn’t know the languages of the cadres where he was minority with communication only in his native English. The few friendly colloquialisms of African tongues he had picked up as every kind of collective with shared aims, activity, conditions, has its own jargon, made do; after all, there were the Cuban cadres most of whom didn’t even know two words of lingua franca English, brothers though they proved themselves, coming from vast distance other than that between the black and white cadres when they were boys.
    That was then. Now the allowance made—to himself, and by his black friends, Mkize and others, the students attracted to the subjects he had taught—it belonged to the dead and the buried. He was an African although he didn’t understand,