None to Accompany Me

by Nadine Gordimer

  That veteran of prisons and interrogation. That fox at infiltration, raiding under the eyes of the police and army. They laughed at the notion.

  —I’m telling you! He seems to be living in the past, a time warp, we’re still some sort of refugee, we must suffer in noble silence—for what the cause doesn’t need any more. While he’s meeting members of the Government, for God’s sake! The Boers fawning all over us, inviting us to official dinners, getting themselves photographed with us for the papers! But he won’t tell anyone on the NEC, straight out, we must have something decent to live in if we’re to function properly at that level. They’re never going to find anything, that I know. We’ll have to do it ourselves … I’ll have to do it … but in the meantime! That flea-pit, I wouldn’t put a dog in it, and you know I don’t like dogs. I never dreamt I’d think back on our basement London flat and the one we had in Stockholm, those grey days—my God, I do.—

  So Sibongile and Didymus Maqoma regained the personae of Sally and Didy, the code names of their old concourse with whites. They came to stay with the Starks. —Ben, you should just see the Hillbrow dump! Not just the dirt Sally goes on about … people sit around in the bar lounge watching television all day long, sprawled there sucking Coca-Cola, nothing to do and nowhere to go. She’s years from that kind of slum atmosphere, even though they’re her own people … she and Didy have moved away from that cheek-by-jowl existence they were at home in, the old days, Chiawelo.—

  Ben defined the element exile had, at least, brought into the Maqomas’ life.—Privacy; they’ve had it in London for years, now.—

  There was no reflection between the Starks that their privacy was invaded for the five weeks Sally and Didy lived with them. Their own relationship was at the stage when the temporary presence of others was revivifying. They had an extra bathroom; that was the only condition of middle-class existence that had any importance for them.

  Sally and Didy’s late-born daughter, Mpho, arrived from her school in England. She stayed indiscriminately, a weekend here, a week there, between her grandmother’s house in Alexandra township and the Starks’ house, sleeping in the bed and among the curling pop-star posters and odd trinkets that had survived their daughter Annick’s adolescence and absence. The Maqoma daughter was a sixteen-year-old beauty of the kind created by the cross-pollination of history. Boundaries are changed, ideologies merge, sects, religious and philosophical, create new idols out of combinations of belief, scientific discoveries link cause and effect between the disparate, ethnically jumbled territorial names make a nationality out of many-tongued peoples of different religions, a style of beauty comes out of the clash between domination and resistance. Mpho was a resolution—in a time when this had not yet been achieved by governments, conferences, negotiations, mass action and international monitoring or intervention—of the struggle for power in the country which was hers, and yet where, because of that power struggle, she had not been born. This schoolgirl combined the style of Vogue with the assertion of Africa. She was a mutation achieving happy appropriation of the aesthetics of opposing species. She exposed the exaggeratedly long legs that seem to have been created not by natural endowment but to the specification of Western standards of luxury, along with the elongated chassis of custom-built cars. The oyster-shell-pink palms of her slender hands completed the striking colour contrast of matt black skin with purple-red painted fingernails. Her hair, drawn back straightened and oiled to the gloss of European hair, was gathered on the crown and twisted into stiff dreadlocks, Congolese style, that fringed her shoulders. Despite all this, Mpho did not have the aspirant beauty queen’s skull grin but a child’s smile of great sweetness, glittering in her eyes. Out of her mouth came a perky London English. She could not speak an African language, neither the Zulu of her mother nor the Xhosa of her father. —Oh but I understand, mother dear, I can follow— And she would open her eyes wide and roll her head, appealing to high heaven in exactly the gesture of the mother with whom she was arguing.

  —Yes, but who knows you understand when you never answer, people will think you’re an idiot, my retarded child. You’re going to have lessons.—

  —Well, that’s pretty humiliating for you, ma, isn’t it—have your daughter taught our language as if it’s French or German or something.—

  Sally appealed to their hosts, Vera and Ben —Listen to that. My girl, that is exactly what has been done to our people, you, your father, me. We’ve been alienated from what is ours, and it’s not only in exile. Your father’s descended from a great chief who resisted the British more than a hundred years ago—you have a name to live up to! You were robbed of your birth—that should have been right here. Take back your language.—

  The schoolgirl gave a smile of complicity with the witnesses to her mother’s emotionalism, dealing with it in harmless insolence. —I’ll learn from my gogo.— She giggled at her use of at least one word in a mother tongue, but was too shy or perhaps defiant to admit that she was serious about the intention. It was of her own volition that she left the guest room so well suited to her age and comfort and often went off to stay with her grandmother in Alexandra. After the first duty visit of respect required of a son’s child, Sally had not expected the girl to go back again soon, let alone pack her luminescent duffle bag and spend days and nights there in the house with its broken-pillared stoep and dust-dried pot-plants, battered relic of real bricks and mortar with two diamond-paned rotting windows from the time when Alex was the reflection of out-of-bounds white respectability, yearned for, imitated, now standing alone on ash-coloured earth surrounded by shacks, and what had once been an aspiration to a patch of fenced suburban garden now a pile of rubbish where the street dumped its beer cans and pissed, and the ribcages of scavenging dogs moved like bellows. How could a child brought up with her own bedroom, fresh milk delivered at the front door in Notting Hill Gate every morning, tidy people who sorted their newspapers for recycling, be expected to stand more than one night in such a place, gogo or no gogo? Going out across a yard to a toilet used by everyone round about! Heaven knows what she might pick up there! A return to a level of life to which Sibongile, Didymus, had been condemned when they were their child’s age—what did a sixteen-year-old born in exile know of what it was like when there was no choice?

  The distress is something that can be conveyed to someone other—Vera—but a kind of pride or self-protection would prevent Sibongile from acknowledging to the child herself the dismayed humbling of the mother by the worldly child’s innocent level of acceptance: the sense that she knows what home is.

  Mpho moved between Alexandra and the house that came from Vera’s divorce settlement with an ease that charmed the Starks. At the Starks’, along with her parents, she met and mingled with the Starks’ friends, Vera’s colleagues from the Foundation, the protégé Oupa and the lawyers. The young people got on well together, Mpho was carried off to parties with these youngsters her relieved parents knew were decent, no drugs or drunkenness; through a contaet of one of the lawyers, the Maqomas found exactly what was needed, a small house in a white suburb near the school where, again with the help of someone met in the Stark circle, the girl was accepted to complete her A-levels. The day after they moved in with nothing but borrowed beds, Sally, taking the car the Movement provided for Didy, drove along the street of local shops to look for secondhand furniture, and reversing into a parking place was held up by a municipal cleaner, a woman sweeping the gutter-muck into a drain. She didn’t know that women did this work, now. Well, any job was better than nothing, these times. It could be that some of those she had known in exile, the fighters in the training camps, might end up sweeping streets; the probability gave her an internal cringe, the drawing in of her stomach muscles that was involuntary when she confronted herself with the responsibility in which she was engaged: she had just been appointed deputy director of the Movement’s regional redeployment programme, at present a collection of research papers emerging at the pace of stuttering fax
es. As she locked the car (forewarned since the day of arrival of those for whom theft was better than nothing) she saw that the cleaner had not moved on, was leaning on her broom and looking at her, a woman dressed ridiculously in the handout of bright protective overalls, football stockings rolled round her calves, flat-footed in men’s shoes, a fisherman’s hat complete with slots for flies crammed on her head. Begging? She would give her a greeting, anyway: Sawubona, sisi.

  The woman did not approach but spoke excitedly. —Sibongile, when did you come? I’m Sela’s child, your mother’s cousin, you remember? From Sela’s house, you used to see us there, in Witbank.—

  Wakened suddenly, shaken alive into another light, another existence. Sally is drawn over to her other self, standing there, the one she started out with, this apparition with a plastic bag tied over the hand with which, deftly, it picks up dirt the broom misses. Home.

  In the streets of Johannesburg, on your way around the city, You don’t know who this is?

  Even Oupa managed to move into a white suburb.

  Why did his white colleagues at the Foundation use, to themselves, the prefix ‘even’? Because once the legal restrictions they campaigned against were lifted there remained an older, even (yes, again) greater restriction to be addressed: poverty. The clerk was decently paid by the decent standards of a Foundation that was non-profit-making not only in the money sense but also the human one, providing the same benefits of medical care and pension fund for all who worked there, from the director to the cleaner. But the rent of apartments in the area where he wanted to live was beyond his means. In one way, he was like any other young man in training for a professional career; a stage when it is assumed the youngster has as yet no responsibilities, has emerged from school, free, to a few years of chasing girls and enjoying himself with his male peers. Starting out in life, the saying goes. But of course this one’s start had been delayed so long, he had queued up unable to get into schools, dropped out into political action, spent four years on Robben Island, that before he could start on the lowest rank of a career he had acquired the responsibilities of maturity. Oupa was a man, not a boy. A burdened man, at the same time as he was the Foundation’s bright protégé. For him the business of growing up had not been, could not be, followed in recognized chronology. Of course Oupa had a wife, somewhere, of course he had children. His decent salary was diminished by the rent, the food, the clothing to be provided out of sight, for the anachronism of his life. The wife and children lived in another part of the country, with relatives who were dumped by the Government in some resettlement area. The eager apprentice was in fact an adult already trapped by adult desires, conflicts and responsibilities.

  The Foundation was more than tolerant of the time he took off from work to find a place, a bachelor home among them in what had been the streets where only whites could live. They feared for him on his daily journeys to and from Soweto by train; he could be knifed by gangsters or thrown out of the window to his death by political thugs. Mrs Stark was remiss in being too busy, at the time, to telephone around among friends who might know of vacancies or have influence with estate agents who were wary about letting to blacks; it was someone else in the office who found a lead that resulted in the young colleague getting what he wanted. He was elated, although the rent was too high for him to afford; untroubled, although he had signed a lease restricting occupancy to two people, and he was going to split the rent by sharing the place with a couple and their two children.

  Oupa planned a house-warming for everyone from the Foundation. Mrs Stark, to compensate for not having been any help to him in finding somewhere to live, offered to contribute homemade snacks and left with him a little early on a Friday afternoon to help with preparations.

  —Where do we go?— Oupa had mentioned enthusiastically to everyone an area where there were numerous apartment buildings but had given no further details. He named a street and chattered on. —It’s an old building, man, but that’s why it’s so nice, big rooms and everything. Here we are—here it is. ‘Delville Wood.’ (Look at that real marble entrance!) Something to do with a war, isn’t it?—

  The car came to a standstill neatly against the kerb. —Delville Wood.— Walking up the steps under packages loaded between them, Mrs Stark turned to him, an odd smile accompanying the banal scrap of information she was giving. —Yes, it’s a battle. Where it happened.—

  He thought there was some unhappy connection with the name he’d ignorantly blundered on. —Someone you knew died there?—

  But she laughed. —That war took place before I was born.—

  He led her along red-polished corridors. Her eyes counted off the numbered doors as they passed.

  —That’s it!—

  In his proud moment, she pronounced before his doorway: —One-Twenty-One.—

  He rapped zestfully on the number and echoed her. —One-Twenty-One Delville Wood.—

  In the living-room two junk-shop chairs covered with nylon velvet shaved by wear, a one-legged stand topped with a fancy copper ashtray, and an old box trunk covered with a piece of African cloth. Everything faced the glaucous giant eye of the television set.

  —Of course it’s not fixed up yet. Pictures and so on. I need a desk and something for my books. I’m going to do a lot of work here, man! But nice, aih?—

  —A desk over there at the window … Ben might have one you could use. Yes, this is a lovely room.—

  He had switched on the television, it was a children’s programme with the squeaky voices of anthropomorphic animals but he did not notice, it didn’t matter, the gesture was that of possession, he was at home in these walls where only whites had lived before.

  —Come and see the rest.—

  Talking expansively, he led her to a room with a double bed made up under a fringed bedspread with three cushions propped diamond-shaped against the wall. —I might put the desk in here, because the others use the sitting-room as well. Better for work.— He was assuring her of his seriousness about studying; after all, although she was a motherly friend, she was also one of the seniors in the Foundation that employed him. The second room: a chaos of clothing, toys, pots and pans, hot plate standing on a triple-mirror dressing table, cot filled with jumbled shoes. —They’re moving in.—

  Oupa went to fetch from the car the folding chairs borrowed from the Foundation and when he returned Mrs Stark was in the kitchen unpacking what she called the goodies. He stood about: —I haven’t got the hang of the stove yet— But she had opened the oven door and taken out fat-encrusted shelves, she tried the plates one by one, knowing exactly how everything worked, I’ll show you, she said, just as she calmly and quietly would explain to him some legal question he would bring to her from his correspondence course. He was flattered that she concentrated on the preparations for his little party as if it were of great importance to get everything right, to think of nothing else until this was so. He felt Mrs Stark knew what this occasion meant to him, even if to others it was just another office party.

  The extended family of the Foundation arrived. Husbands and wives, permanent lovers of this sex or that, the other half of unexplained attachments. There was the bonhomie of the special set of relationships between people who work together and find themselves at play, their joking in-house references that others might not follow but which raised the general level of celebration. Somebody’s boy-friend had brought a guitar and he sang his compositions in a mixture of Zulu, English and Afrikaans to a group that stood about or sat with their drinks on the fringed bedcover in the bedroom, while in the living-room nobody was listening, the talk and laughter at a higher volume than the music. Mrs Stark’s hot cheese puffs ran out. She and several others from the Foundation were back in the kitchen opening cans of Viennas that seemed to be Oupa’s sole food supply, when her husband arrived late and had brought along a carrier of wine and beer. With a knife in one hand and the greasy other hand held away from contact with his jacket, she dropped what she was doing and went over
to kiss him for the thought. He almost backed in surprise, then held her shoulders a moment; it was so unlike her to make a show of affection public. His contribution to the party hardly called for any special mark of gratitude; perhaps she’d had a few drinks—well, why not?

  The promised desk was picked up from the Starks’ house and delivered to One-Twenty-One Delville Wood by a friend of Oupa who borrowed a bakkie from another friend. Oupa bought a computer, on credit, to complete the equipment; the only problem, he remarked to Mrs Stark some weeks later, was that the friend who transported the desk had moved into the flat with him, the couple, and the two children. —He’s got no place to stay. His place is in Sebokeng and now he’s working here in town.— Soon this friend, who had agreed to contribute to the rent, was joined by another, workless and penniless. This came out when Oupa, bringing his lunch as usual into Mrs Stark’s office, relieved by talking to her his anxiety about not having fulfilled that month’s correspondence-course assignments. —He also slept in the living-room, with my other friend. On the floor, but better than nothing, aih? But now the other people are fed up, they say they’re paying for sharing the sitting-room and he’s always there, lying around. And doesn’t pay. So now he stays with me in my room and when I want to study at night he’s talking to me all the time. Man! Till midnight, one o’clock.—

  What could she be expected to say? ‘Tell him to find somewhere else.’ Where else? Weren’t she and the young clerk surrounded by the papers, right there under crumbs from their lunch, of people who had been sent somewhere else, over years, and still had nowhere. She offered what she knew was useless, indignant at exploitation of him by his peers; he could have been her son. —Oupa, you have to be firm. You’re too soft. If he could move in with you, there must be someone else he can go to in the same way. You can’t be expected to live like that. Now you’ve at last got a place—