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present.
    You don’t remember me?
    The past is known to be irretrievable. But here that proposition is overturned.
    In the euphoria of being back, of presenting themselves alive, resurrected from the anonymity of exile, of these who have returned, and the eager desire of those who have stayed at home to make up, in welcome, for the deprivation of exile they have not suffered, people who had had reason to distrust or simply dislike one another and people who once had been close as brothers and sisters are all greeted in the same way as cherished returning heroes. It is something of the same phenomenon as young Oupa’s lively accounts that do not discriminate between terrors he has experienced and the everyday gossip of the Foundation’s personnel. A convention came instantly into being, as conventions often do, to serve where it seems established patterns of behaviour don’t. Yet beneath it, under the disguise of flesh, behind the sunken eyes, within the clothes of a foreign cut, the black leather caps of East Germany, the dashikis of Tanzania, the Arab keffiyeh worn as a scarf, the old events and circumstances exist; standing there in the street, the old dependencies, the old friendships, the old factional rivalries, the old betrayals and loyalties, political scandals and sexual jealousies were not gone for ever but persisted in evidence of traceable, ineffaceable features, visible cell structure, still living. The past was there.
    Perhaps because of the break in continuity this was so. If the satin skin had been seen slowly bruising dark with age and heavy drinking, if the blond curls had been observed, in the course of ordinary encounters, thinning, if Jonah had been heavier, maturing each time he dropped in for talk and a beer with Ben, the changes would have wound away naturally in the reel of years. But there was no tape running between the state of being they had been in when they left for exile or prison and their sudden reappearance back here where they had left: the weight their lives had was the weight of the past, out of storage and delivered to those who had stayed behind.
    The man whom experiences had bowed to one side and shorn of his hair turned up at Vera’s office to see if there might be something for him—a research job, anything; he had been back three months and could not find work. He had been a journalist on an often-banned small paper when they knew one another long ago. While she tried to make some suggestions, where he might find employment and—she had to offer—she would be able to put in a word for him, there lay between them the knowledge that he was—had been—suspected of being a police agent at one time, and when he fled the country, although apparently cleared of this suspicion, he was mixed up in some schismatic defection. This was what he was, to her; she did not know whether he had been reinstated among the exiles abroad and whether or not he had returned with the status of one fully accepted within the Movement—knowing him only in the persona of the past, she saw that that persona might have inveigled by some subterfuge the status to return under indemnity, supposedly vouched for by the Movement.
    But if there were ambiguous feelings subsuming the enthusiasm of welcome and the obligations it carried, there was also the overwhelming sense of good times impossibly restored.Among the people who were returning were some the sight and sound of whom, their very mannerisms and turn of phrase, were proof that such times are carried along within the self.
    When a railway line is abandoned, the tracks aren’t taken up. Under weeds and grass, they remain, marking a route. For the Starks, with Sibongile and Didymus Maqoma suddenly sitting in the Starks’ living-room again after more than twenty years, there was the unexpected warmth and understanding, across the conditioned inhibitions of colour, between couples sharing youth and the ties of