'It's not your fault,' Victoria consoled him. 'The wrong name, I mean. They can't blame you. You couldn't have known.' 'No, you're right.' The captain perked up visibly. 'It's not my fault.
I'll just serve it on you anyway. They can sort it out back at HQ.' 'What is it?' Victoria asked curiously.
'It's a banning order,' the captain explained. He showed it to her.
'It's signed by the minister of police. I have to read it to you, then you have to sign it,' he explained and then he looked contrite. 'I'm sorry, it's my duty.' 'That is all right.' Vicky smiled at him. 'You have to do your duty.' He looked down at the document again and began to read aloud:
TO VICTORIA THANDELA DINIZUL. U
Notice in terms of Section 9(i) of the Internal Security Act 1950 (Act of 1950). Whereas 1, Manfred De La Rey, Minister of Police, am satisfied that you are engaged in activities which endanger or are calculated to endanger the maintenance of public order -The captain stumbled over the more complicated legal phraseology and mispronounced some of the English words. Vicky corrected him helpfully. The banning document was four typewritten pages, and the policeman reached the end of it with patent relief.
'You have to sign here.' He offered her the document.
q don't have a pen.' 'Here, use mine.' 'Thank you,' said Victoria.
'You are very kind.' She signed her name in the space provided and as she handed him back his pen, she had ceased to be a complete person. Her banning order prohibited her from being in the company of more than two other persons at any one time, except in the course of her daily work, of addressing any gathering or preparing any written article for publication. It confined her physically to the magisterial area of Johannesburg and required that she remain under house arrest for twelve hours of the day and also that she report daily to her local police station.
'I'm sorry,' the police captain repeated, as he screwed the top back on his pen. 'You seem a decent girl.' 'It's your job,' Victoria smiled back at him. 'Don't feel bad about it.' Over the following days Victoria retreated into the strange halfworld of isolation. During working hours she found that her peers and superiors avoided her, as though she were a carrier of plague.
The matron moved her out of the room that she shared with two other nursing sisters and she was given a small single room on the unpopular southern side of the hostel which never received the sun in winter. In this room her meals were served to her on a tray as she was prohibited from using the dining-hall when more than two other persons were present. Each evening after coming off shift she made the two-mile walk down to the police station to sign the register, but this soon became a pleasant outing rather than a penance. She was able to smile and greet the people she passed on the street for they did not know she was a non-person and she enjoyed even that fleeting human contact.
Alone in her room she listened to her portable radio and read the books that Moses had given her, and thought about him. More than once she heard his name on the radio. Apparently a controversial film had been shown on the NABS television channel in the United States which had created a furore across the continent. It seemed that South Africa, which for most Americans was a territory remote as the moon and a thousand times less important, was suddenly a political topic. In the film Moses Gama had figured largely, and such was his presence and stature that he had been accepted abroad as the central figure in the African struggle. In the United Nations debate which had followed the television film, nearly every one of the speakers had referred to Moses Gama. Although the motion in the General Assembly calling for the condemnation of South Africa's racial discrimination had beerr vetoed in the Security Council by Great Britain, the debate had sent a ripple across the world and a cold shiver down the spine of the white government in the country.
South Africa had no television network, but on her portable radio Victoria listened to a pungent edition of 'Current Affairs' on the state-controlled South African Broadcasting Corporation in which the campaign of defiance was described as the action of a radical minority, and Moses Gama was viiifled as a communist-inspired revolutionary criminal who was still at large, although a warrant had been issued for his arrest on a charge of high treason.
Cut off from all other sympathetic human contact, Victoria found herself pining for him with such desperate longing that she cried herself to sleep in her lonely room each night.
On the tenth day of her banning she was returning from her daily report to the police station, keeping to the edge of the pavement in that sensual gliding walk that the Nguni woman practises from childhood when she carries every load, from faggots of firewood to five-gallon clay pots of water, balanced upon her head. A light delivery van slowed down as it approached her from behind, and began to keep pace with her.
Victoria was accustomed to extravagant male attention, for she was the very essence of Nguni female beauty, and when the driver of the vehicle whistled softly, she did not glance in his direction but lifted her chin an inch and assumed a haughty expression.
The driver whistled again, more demandingly, and from the corner of her eye she saw the van was blue with the sign EXPRESS DRY CLEANERS -- SIX HOUR SERVICE painted on the side. The driver was a big man, and although his cap was pulled low over his eyes, she sensed he was attractive and masterful. Despite herself her hips began to swing as she strode on, and her large perfectly round buttocks oscillated like the cheeks of a chipmunk chewing a nut.
'Victoria!' Her name was hissed, and the voice was unmistakable.
She stopped dead and swung round to face him.
'You!' she whispered, and then glanced around her frantically.
For the moment the sidewalk was clear and only light traffic moved down the highway between rows of tall bluegum trees. Her eyes flashed back to his face, almost hungrily, and she whispered, 'Oh Moses, I didn't think you'd come.' He leaned across the front seat of the van and opened the door nearest her, and she rushed across and threw herself into the moving van.
'Get down,' he ordered, and she crouched below the dashboard while he slammed the door closed and accelerated away.
'I couldn't believe it was you. I still don't - this van, where did you get it? Oh Moses, you'll never know how much - I heard your name on the radio, many times - so much has happened --' She found that she was gabbling almost hysterically. It had been so long since she had been able to talk freely, and it was as though the painful abscess of loneliness and longing had burst and all the poison was draining in the rush of words.
She began to tell him about the nurses; strike and the banning, and hid of J hei no. ks ulu. had. can.*zted, her-
