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PARTISAN REVIEW
women were brought to her dying of pneumonia and children were
brought to her dwarfed by malnutrition." But Claudia never followed any
of her patients out of her clinic or gave refuge to the victims of a cruel
totalitarianism. Harald only discovers his connection with the unfortunate
when he waits out his son's trial for murder. He discovers that "he and his
wife belonged, now, to the other side of privilege. Neither whiteness, nor
observance of the teachings of Father and Son, nor the pious respectabili–
ty of liberalism, nor money that had kept them in safety-that other form
of segregation-could change their status.
In
a way, that status was defini–
tive as the forced removals of the old regime; no chance of remaining
where they had been, surviving in themselves
as they were."
Aid in their enlightenment has also "come from the other side" at last,
the side of black experience, through the black lawyer Duncan had chosen
to represent him. Duncan himself is rarely present in the book, his physi–
cal imprisonment seeming to stand for his removal from the scene in
which he becomes only a challenge to the understanding of others. But
Hamilton Motsamai is perhaps the novel's most important character
besides the elder Lindgards. He is a sophisticated representative of the new
Africa, a source of insight and humor-and of hope. As they despair, fall
apart from each other, descend to begging the lawyer to do anything, any–
thing, to "get him off" this "stranger from the other side of a divided past,"
saves their son. He saves him by simply making everything explicable. As in
July's People,
the reversal of role between black and white has been the
source of the white man's new vision. The Lindgards grow close to
Motsamai and also
to
a young black gay friend of Duncan's, Khulu, who
becomes another son. Their unadmitted aversion for homosexuality drops
away along with their latent racism. And they look forward to the birth of
Natalie's child-who may be either Duncan's or Cad's, a grandson in any
case. Even this madwoman provides an unexpected enlightenment as she
exposes, in her ravings, the arrogance and fallacy of master-race presump–
tion. Duncan, she says, "takes on other people. Forces. Can't leave them
alone....And he's perfectly ugly when you resist." She taunted him: "You
wanted to save me in the missionary position"-wanted, that is, to marry
her and make her have children and have a career, too, because that's what
the woman he saved should have-and she had stayed with him for her
own reasons and helped to destroy him.
