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of transparent wings, there/away, she felt she was about to lie down onthe damp rough grass and dream something she had forgotten. She came back to herself and through the fence again. The Odensville man was still sitting as if at a church meeting. —What about you?—
    But if he understood the brisk reference to the humble call of nature he perhaps thought it an embarrassing familiarity on the part of this woman, from whom he expected the formulations of the law. He dusted the elbows of his jacket as he rose, asking whether she would mind dropping him at a store nearby, he had to see someone. He got out of the station-wagon there, taking off his hat.
    â€”I’ll be contacting you when I have any news, good or bad. You have my phone number? Yes, keep me posted if there are any developments. One of us’ll come out again some time next week to take statements—if you could get some people together.—
    It was the same sort of professional formula she had used for the farmer, a lawyer must not identify with the anxiety of a client any more than a doctor can function effectively if he begins to feel the pain of his patient.
    A day or night when Vera heard, like a phrase recurring from a piece of music once listened to and out of mind:
Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid. We won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children.
    She separated the three statements.
    Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid.
    (Meneer Odendaal) We won’t harm you.
    (Meneer Odendaal) Not you or your wife and children.
    She thought that she had not heard them aright on the stoep that day. The farmer heard them and Rapulana the Odensvilleman heard them the way she did not, they understood what was being said. The words of tolerance and forgiveness so strangely coming from the Odensville squatter dweller, shaming her for the crude aggression of the farmer, were not tolerance and forgiveness but a threat. Remember, Meneer Odendaal, we are thousands on Portion 19, our Odensville. We are there across the veld from you, every night. You have dogs, you have a gun, but we are thousands, and we can come across the veld to this house, this house where you and your wife and your children are asleep, and, as you said about us if we don’t go from Portion 19, that’ll be your funeral.

Transit
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Chapter 3
    You don’t know who this is?
    On her way in the city, coming up to the street from the underground garage where her car had its regular booth, a creature within its range of burrows walking the block to the Foundation from the bank, a coffee bar where she might have joined a friend or the Italian restaurant where occasionally she and Ben, in the observance of a forgotten retreat for clandestine lovers, met for lunch, Vera sometimes found herself stopped by someone who was searching for recognition to come from her.
    You don’t know who this is?
    The chestnut satin skin of a young black woman now darkened and puckered beneath the eyes, the saucy jut of dancing buttocks now built into a monument of solid, middle-aged flesh; a figure of a man with one tired shoulder lower than the other, shining pink dome where Vera would have recognized only the lost blond curls, another whose belly-fat, straining gaps between shirt buttons, had swallowed the slender black Jonah (that really happened to be his name) she and Ben had hidden from the police in Ben’s office before he fled the country—who would suspect a market research consultancy of harbouring one of theleaders of the uprising in ‘76. Some had come from their years in prison, some were the first of those returning from exile. As they talked, hands grasped, sometimes embracing, the double embrace first clasped round this side of the neck then that, which everyone in the liberation movement forgot was derived from the embrace of dictators, Vera and these old acquaintances and friends were giddy with discovery, the past set down on the streets of the