LITMIR.BIZ

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for anything because a refusal always hurts.’

      This attitude has meant that I have probably missed out on a great deal, but it also means that anything friends do for me, the smallest gift, the simplest thoughtfulness, comes as a magnificent bonus.

      Anthony is one of the warmest, friendliest, kindest people you could meet. When I was in Omagh, Northern Ireland, he took me around, and wherever we went there was someone who greeted him as a friend. Yet, when I asked him how he defined a friend he said, ‘I don’t think I have any friends. I think in your lifetime you’re going to be lucky to meet anyone – two, three at the most, people – whom you could define as friends, in the way that I would perceive friendship. I think friendship develops over years of trust and acceptance, I suppose. For me, I have no recollection of having friends who were unconditional. The friends that I have are friends because it suits them to be my friends, or vice versa. While I think a lot of them, they’re not friends in the sense I think you’re asking me about friendship – except for Anne, my wife, and that friendship took twenty-five years to come about. I’ve told Anne this: when we got married, I didn’t know what love was. I walked up the aisle in hope. She finds it a great source of pain when I say that to her, because she thinks of her wedding day as a day of such love and hope. She can’t believe that I didn’t. I’m totally honest with her. I say, “The experience I had with you is something very special, but I couldn’t really say I loved you until we had ten years of marriage through us, through our lives.” I realized then that I loved her.’

      Anthony was the sixth of eleven children born to a bitterly unhappy couple. He said, ‘Friends weren’t encouraged in our family because there was enough of us in the family not to have friends around. God, you wouldn’t have brought your friend round for tea as well! There was already eleven children to feed. So I just keep comfortable distances with people, because of the mask I wear. I would be a person who has to wear a lot of different faces for different people, and I find that difficult in the long term. I feel almost insincere, because the face I would wear for you would be different from the face from the one at work, or home, or whatever. These faces sustain me and carry me through life. For a long time I felt insincere with that, but I’ve learned to make sense of it. I miss that relationship that could be there somewhere. I know I’m very well known and popular, but those people would be at a comfortable distance. Anne is the only person who really knows me. I think, too, I’ve found friendships in books. Certain books, they’re close friends. Books don’t betray you.’

      Anthony, I guess, is like me in that I can usually detect in others the wariness that evolves as a defence when a child discovers that he cannot trust the people who should be caring for him. Adult life does little to diminish such wariness because once we discover the treachery of others unconditional trust can never be reborn.

      I found this wariness in one of the most delightful people, someone I met in a jazz bar in Beirut, where he worked.

      James was magnificently beautiful. Every evening when I was in Beirut I sat at the bar, where he gave out smiles, drinks, food, and listened to the regulars who, like me, were gathered around him. One evening when the bar was quiet James told me that he came from Freetown, Liberia, but as an adult he had lived in various places in Europe where, I gathered though he did not say, life had been hard. When he was young his parents had been Muslim but his aunt, who brought him up, was a Baptist. He’d helped her to look after the church, and he had learned to believe in God – one God for all of us, even though different people had different names for God. He knew that God saw us as being all the same, all sinners. The idea that the colour of a person’s skin or the beliefs that a person held made one person different from another was a human idea, not God’s, and very wrong.

      When it came to friendship James waited to see how things turned out. He was very friendly. He bestowed his warm, gracious smile on everyone immediately on meeting and in every interaction and seemed so unlike many of the Beirutis, whom the war had left tense and wary. When I asked him about friends he told me that he might meet a person on one occasion and then on another, and each time all would be right no matter how long the time between meetings, and then, perhaps, they would meet and everything would not be right. So, with all his friends, he would just wait and see how things turned out.

      He said, ‘When people say to me, “I love you, James,” or, “I’m your friend,” I wonder what it is they want. I wait, I wait and see what happens.’

      I did not ask James what he did if ‘what happens’ was not to his liking. I felt that this would take us into issues of religion and of race, and these were not safe issues to discuss in a bar in Beirut.

      However, in South Africa, the enemy is a common topic of conversation. Our guide to the prison where the enemies of the apartheid regime had been incarcerated on Robben Island had been imprisoned there from 1963 to 1978, when prison conditions were at their very worst. He told us, ‘The guards and security were my enemies. Robben Island was my first and last enemy.’

      His last enemy has now lost power, and life in post-apartheid South Africa is full of ironies. Ex-political prisoners take visitors to a respectful viewing of cell number five, which once housed Nelson Mandela, while in Johannesburg my guide to another holy of holies, the Voortrekker Monument, was Simbo, a Zulu from Soweto, that south-western township established to separate the blacks from the whites.

      The Afrikaner apartheid regime had been based on the belief that God had created blacks inferior to whites in order that they should work for the whites. Mamphela Ramphele, now Vice-Chancellor of Cape Town University, mentioned this in her autobiography. She began her professional education at Bethesda Teacher Training College, which had been started by Dutch Reformed Church missionaries in the 1930s. She described how the white teachers kept their distance from the black students and how the students were compelled to carry out huiswerk (Afrikaans for ‘housework’),

      which was a form of forced labour intended to remind students that education was not an escape route from the inferior position blacks were ‘destined’ to occupy … The principal’s wife, Mrs Grütter, who was our music teacher, was the most unpleasant of all [the teachers]. She often reminded those students who seemed to her unenthusiastic in their tasks: ‘You were born to work for us.’²

      Simbo, like Mamphela, found that his life changed markedly when apartheid came to an end. He obtained a most sought-after job, that of a tourist guide. Simbo drove me to the Voortrekker Monument, which looks like a huge, old-fashioned radio set upon a high hill. It was built to impress on all the implacable power and virtue of God’s own people, the Voortrekkers, who had fought and defeated the Zulu nation and established their own fair land, only to have it taken from them by the treacherous English. Inside the monument Simbo conducted me around the carved frieze on the four walls of the large interior room. Here the history of the Great Trek was depicted, and Simbo knew it well. He pointed out the different characters – the Boer men were all brave and handsome and the women all beautiful and true – and he showed me how the Boers had enslaved the blacks.

      When we had finished our tour of Pretoria and set off back to Johannesburg I asked Simbo if he had any enemies. In answer he spoke of individuals who might know him personally but did not wish him well.

      I asked him how he felt about the Afrikaners. I said, ‘When I was here last in 1991 you wouldn’t have been allowed anywhere near the Voortrekker Monument.’

      He smiled and talked gently about the pass laws which restricted black and coloured people to certain areas. ‘See those women?’ he said, pointing to two African matrons walking home from work. ‘If they’d been there and didn’t have their pass book they’d be arrested and put in jail. Now I don’t mind the Afrikaners, provided they join with us and make this one country, all of us together.’

      The Voortrekker Monument was for him a fine thing. It had given him what he wanted most – a job.

      In Lebanon enemies still have power and so it was only in the privacy of a car that I was able to ask Samir, my driver, about friends and enemies as we spent three days together touring Lebanon. He was a large man in his late forties and knew Beirut and the roads in Lebanon and into Syria

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