Read Online You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town by Zoë Wicomb - Free Book Online Page A

any sense of horror or shock or even distaste at the assassination?’ I ask.
    Moira taps her beautiful fingers on the table. James gets up. ‘I’d better get along and speak to Sally’s table over there,’ he says.
    â€˜Well, do you?’ I persist. ‘Can you imagine being a member of his family or anyone close to him?’
    â€˜No,’ she says. ‘Do you think there’s something wrong with us? Morally deficient?’
    â€˜Dunno. My father would call it inhuman, unchristian. It seems to me as if common humanity is harped on precisely so that we don’t have to consider the crucial question of whether we can imagine being a particular human being. Or deal with the implications of the answer. All I can tell of the human condition is that we can always surprise ourselves with thoughts and feelings we never thought we had.’
    Moira laughs. ‘You’re always ready with a mouthful of words. I’m surprised that you have any trouble with knocking off an essay.’
    As we go off towards the Arts block we watch the gardeners in their brown overalls putting out hundreds of chairs in the square to accommodate all the students and staff. The chairs are squashed between the flowerboxes where the spring-green of foliage just peeps over the concrete. I try to think what they are but cannot imagine flowers tumbling over that concrete rim now lashed by the shadow of the wind-tossed flag.
    Later I lean against the brick wall at the back of the cafeteria, my knees drawn up and the folder resting on the plane of my thighs. The soil is somewhat damp but I do not mind since a luke-warm sun has travelled round to this wall. Besides, there is nowhere else to go; the library as well as the cafeteria is shut and I wouldn’t like to sit in the deserted Arts block.
    A heavy silence hangs over the campus. The bush is still as if the birds are paying their respects to the dead Verwoerd. This freshly rinsed light won’t last; such a stillness can only precede the enervating sweep of the south-easterly wind. I watch an ant wriggle her thorax along a blade of grass before I turn to my watch to find that the minute arm has raced ahead. The ceremony will start in fifteen minutes. It will probably last an hour and before that my essay must be finished and delivered. I read Retief’s notes and start afresh. This will have to be my final copy since there is no time to develop ideas, let alone rephrase clumsy language. My attempt to understand the morality of the novel has to be abandoned. Retief will get what he wants, a reworking of his notes, and I will earn a mark qualifying for the examination.
    It is not easy to work in this eerie silence. The stillness of the trees, the dark bush ahead inspire an unknown fear, a terror as if my own eyes, dark and bold as a squirrel’s, stareat me from the bush. I am alone. The lecturers settling into their mourning seats under the flag some three hundred yards away offer no reassurance. If only a bird would scream or an animal rush across the red carpet of Rooikrans pods along the fringe of the bush, this agitation would settle. When the tall Australian bluegums shiver in the first stir of air, I retrieve my restless fingers raking through the grass to attend to Tess, luscious-lipped Tess, branded guilty and betrayed once more on this page. Time’s pincers tighten round my fingers as I press on. This essay, however short and imperfect, must be done before three o’clock.
    I start at the sound of gravel crunched underfoot. Surely there is no one left. Students in the hostel would keep to their rooms; others have rushed off for the 1.30 bus, too anxious to hitch the customary lift to the residential areas. I get up cautiously, tiptoe to the edge of the wall and peer round to see a few young men in their Sunday suits filing from the Theology College towards the square. They walk in silence, their chins lifted in a militaristic display of