None to Accompany Me

by Nadine Gordimer

  —Dorp connoisseurs.— Ben ran fingers up and down through hair on his thigh.

  —And they don’t know how it came to happen, do they. Wine-tasting and a terrorist attack! Ben—it’s as if something contrived exactly what would show how out of the incongruity in our lives comes the horror? That’s just it! Innocence, they say. I don’t know what that means, any more, if it means we don’t know what’s happening outside a golf course. If people can sit sipping and spitting some Cape vintage ‘innocent’ of the existence for others of guns and bombs. How far away from one another they were, for the clash of incongruity to be so awful.—

  —Further than we were.—

  If it was a question she didn’t seem to hear. Across mown greens and raked bunkers, across veld farmland, the man’s reassuring broad back is leading them, the farmhouse door slams shut. —If you were to put that clubhouse in some film, some agitprop film, everyone would say it was too contrived, too obvious, too symbolic. Wine and blood. But with us, it happens.—

  Sometimes picking up a garment as if not recognizing it, they dressed. The radio recounted the attack. —Thank god that crowd has taken responsibility—if you don’t deny you’re con firming, aih? That won’t give anybody the chance to dump blame on the Movement.— Ben worked his feet into worn moccasins. —Not a noble satisfaction, I know.—

  —How would the Movement be thought to go in for that kind of tactic? With what purpose? It’s not exactly an act to reassure whites and win their votes when the time comes.— Vera was making the bed.

  —Exactly. That’s why it would be useful to the government, if suspicion could be planted. But once responsibility’s boasted elsewhere—with a nice racist ring to it—you heard what the APLA4 man said: there’s outrage only because the victims are white.—

  —But that’s true, you know it, Ben. Last week a whole family was gunned down in their sleep. But in a black township not a golf club. Four or five lines on an inside page. Even I only now remember reading it … And no statement from the ones who’re outraged now.—

  —You know what my partner would say if you told him that? ‘What if you’d been in that clubhouse? Your wife?’—

  —So we keep the pretence that’s forced upon us by this killing among so many. That everyone deplores, condemns unequivocally etc.—

  —Yes, yes! You can’t support any part of the views of that man, can you—

  At breakfast the young women appeared languidly tousled, their yawns rapidly silenced by the news. —Imagine, could you possibly imagine how terrified they must have been, for a moment thinking someone was playing a sick joke, and then the person beside you blown to bits … better to be killed at once than to know you might be next.— Annie drew in her lips and hunched her arms. —Think of us all last night.— The two women held hands resting on the table, Annie’s the spatulate-fingered, much-scrubbed hands of a doctor, the friend’s large and dirtied with nicotine on skin and nails. In a skimpy T-shirt and shorts Lou was seen to be very thin and muscular, the nipples of breasts like a preadolescent’s nobby beneath the clinging shirt, a concave chest between round posts of shoulders. The linked hands were laid out before Ben and Vera; their eyes drawn to them as the talk went back and forth.

  Annie was persistent. —D’you think it could have been us?—

  —The bishop said it could have happened in the middle of his service.— Vera directed herself to the girl Lou; it was as if she had something to ask her other than what was being said. —I don’t suppose the fact that we were blacks and whites would make much difference if the object is to create terror. Stop negotiations. But think of the international hullabaloo if the UN representative were to have been killed. Now that would have been something to wake up the outside world to this Government’s failure to deal with violence.—

  Lou gave an aghast laugh. Annie assumed responsibility, perhaps admiringly, for her mother. —You do take things coolly!— She cocked her head to touch Lou’s, it was the foal’s butting gesture with which as a child she would claim affection and comfort from Ben or Vera. —Well … will you excuse us? That rather nice Lazar’s asked us to come for a walk on a farm, he’s due to pick us up.—

  Ben was wheeling through stations on the radio for one that might be giving further details of the attack. —Where’d they say they’re off to?—

  —Lazar’s invited them somewhere.—

  —Lazar? Oh.—

  We can’t talk now.

  He’s sitting in her office against the light; the still solidity of him. She gets up from her desk to lower a blind and his features emerge, watching, listening. What is it about that face? The eyes—the eyes in repose always have that line of fellow-feeling, a slight lifting crease of the lower lid; that’s the only way she can define it to herself. Where does it come from, that expression that is not a smile, that self-assurance that is not concealed arrogance? There is nothing in her experience of other people to explain this man. Whatever she tries does not fit. Yet she does not need to enter his life with personal enquiries that would become a burden to both, each having to take into account circumstances with which, unlike the Odensville affair, she has nothing to do.

  —You once said something. ‘We won’t harm you or your wife, your family.’—

  —Yes. Yes.—

  —And then he came with his commando and people in the squatter camp were killed.—

  —Yes. He did.—

  —Now what about this attack, the night we were all together at my house. When we talked on the phone you said you were shocked, it was a cruel and terrible thing—you said. Just as everybody else, we all did. I know you mean what you say. I said the same. But I don’t trust myself.—

  Patient for understanding, he never was waiting to jump in with his own opinions.

  —What reason have you not to trust yourself, Vera.—

  —The same reason I have not to trust any of us.—

  They smiled.

  —We all pass deftly from hand to hand the assumption that it’s human life that’s sacred, it’s an unblinking pact, we look each other in the eye and say, it’s the killing of human beings we deplore, we don’t have any other considerations, no matter who does it or why.—

  —Isn’t that so?—

  —Isn’t it the conventional wisdom of whites? And what’s that to us? Blacks don’t believe it. When I heard that APIA man on the radio saying there’s outrage only because this time whites were killed, I agreed with him. He shocked people because they see him as racist, but what he said is more than fact, Zeph, it’s true, it’s right inside, deep in whites who own newspapers and the TV and radio stations. But we can’t say it because we’re not racist, we can’t say it because we have to demonstrate we don’t stereotype, we don’t use racial categories in the worth of human life. Killings are killings. Death is death. Blood and wine mix. All we can produce is this cover-up.—

  —People don’t believe what they’re saying.— Her proposition put before her.

  —The people I know. And the people you know, blacks?—

  —There are some who believe.—

  —How can they! They know Odendaal wanted to kill them. What were their lives, to him.—

  —This thing—what you call it, conventional wisdom, it’s a kind of law, isn’t it—what’s right, what’s wrong, that everyone really knows. If we find the people who speak it don’t mean what they’re saying, the law’s empty, there’s only one thing left.— He stopped, claiming his time. —We have to take the law into our own hands.—

  Her mouth changed in bewilderment.

  —Because we mean it: killing is killing, every life is one of ours. So we have to become a law unto ourselves.—

  She was moved, and blurted with awkward flippancy —Well why not, there are many who have done so for other reasons.—

  He had come to the city because there was to be a further meeting with a provincial official over application to have the land purchased from Odendaal declared a site-and-service settlemen
t for the people known as the Odensville squatters. The Chief was expected to accompany Vera and Zeph Rapulana to Pretoria; apparently he had stayed over the weekend with friends not known to Rapulana, since their arrival in the city together. As Vera and Zeph walked into the Foundation’s lobby, he entered with an attendant a few steps behind him. He was the son of the first of his father’s wives, a young man who held his head tilted back so that he looked down with half-closed eyes at those who greeted him. The hand, when Vera shook it, was the coldly damp one of someone who has had a drinking night. Zeph Rapulana in all his mature dignity placed his palms together, bowed with knees stiff, and pronounced a formal greeting in the terms of traditional obeisance. Yet both knew the Chief would be saying to the official only what Rapulana had coached him to say, only what Rapulana and Mrs Stark of the Legal Foundation had decided upon. Rapulana had said as if to himself—His interests are elsewhere. He wanted to come to Johannesburg and learn to play in a band, but his late father wouldn’t allow it … Perhaps he was wrong.—

  Vera stood by, as an unbeliever before any ritual. Zeph was his own man with masters and slaves, yet he knew how to dissemble; but whether it was to the Chief or whether to show that he himself, his own man, was definitively a black man, her observation of him did not easily reveal. At the same time, she was beginning to have an inkling that her sense of connection with this man was that she had something to learn from him, as all unbelievers secretly hope to appropriate a value without adopting a faith.

  Their daughter is back sleeping, breathing in the house as she did when she was a child.

  Ben turns off the light above the bed where he and her mother lie.

  —I still hope she’ll fall in love one day.—

  —She is in love.—

  We can’t talk now.

  He didn’t have a name any more. They spoke of him as the old man; he had had a second stroke and lost the power of speech. He was incontinent and Vera had the impression that the whole house smelled like the primates’ cage at a zoo, although Thandeka’s care was supplemented by a trained nurse brought in on night duty. Ben saw Vera’s nostrils pinching and felt anxious for her—this was his father, after all. It was as if he himself were in danger of becoming repulsive to her. He suggested it would be best to put the old man in a private hospital where he’d be well cared for. It was Annick who objected. —He’s quite adequately cared for here, there’s nothing more to be done: it’s a massive stroke.—

  —So it doesn’t make any difference where he is, Annie. And this house really isn’t geared to hold nurses and all the paraphernalia—it’s just distressing for everyone to no purpose.—

  But Annick was a doctor, she did not need to remind her father. She had taken over from him the necessary contact with the old man’s doctor, since colleagues can be more open with one another, even if they may be mistaken in their perceptions, as the doctor was when he told Annie he did not want to cause pain to her father by telling him that this stroke was terminal and the sooner life ended the better. —It does make every difference. He may not be able to move or speak to you, but he’s not unconscious. He knows where he is. He knows he’s at home.—

  —Hardly that. He had to give up his own place, as you know. He’s been with us only a few months.—

  Annick opened her clear-lipped mouth and touched the tip of her tongue to her teeth, his mannerism inherited along with his beauty; so often, in her presence, it seemed that nature was mocking him in his own image, a reluctant Narcissus. She spoke gently. —Home where you are, Dad.—

  She came out to the stoep-study and hitched her hip onto the table where Vera was doing some weekend work for the Foundation. —Would it be better for you if Lou and I cut short our stay. Don’t be worried about saying so.—

  —My god Annie, no. It’s better for us that you’re here.—

  —But we’re occupying the second bathroom … —

  —It doesn’t matter. You know how to see that the nurse and Thandeka are doing what they ought to.—

  —Lou would like to take over the cooking, you know. She’s damn good, at our place she does it all, I don’t have to boil an egg.—

  —Is that a fair division of labour—you both work.— Vera did not lift her head from her papers.

  Her daughter’s gaze drifted relaxedly out of the window for a moment, where the sheen of a hadeda’s back took on peacock colours as it dug its beak-probe into the grass. —What about you and Ben? I remember when we were kids, he did most of the fetching and carrying to school and so on.— She smiled, for admittance. —Hasn’t he always indulged you—quite in awe of your career, you’re his priority, and yours … well you’ve always been available to so many other people. Is there ever a really fair division of labour, as you call it, between couples?—

  The sense of approaching some move that would change what they were, what they had been since Vera had wept with the joy of absolution when the girl child was born in the image of Bennet, grew between them, a supersonic hum only they could hear. Instinctively—the Foundation papers were under her hand—Vera took on the impersonal openness of her professional manner: Mrs Stark spoke.

  —Ben can’t believe you are a couple. He refuses to see it.—

  —You mean, accept it?—

  —But also to see. He doesn’t interpret what he sees.—

  Annie wriggled her way more comfortably onto the table, pushing papers aside. —What does he think he sees.—

  —Well, when I told him you were sleeping in one bed, that it’s your choice, he took it as a sign of some sort of immaturity. He said why not a teddy-bear.—

  Annie laughed. Clients often laughed when they were about to defend themselves from some real or imagined accusation. —But you have gay friends, you and Dad, there were gays at the party. Some of your Foundation people.—

  —Men. Not his daughter. He just can’t believe it. He was matchmaking with Lazar, he saw that Lazar was attracted to you—you are beautiful you know, men could be mistaken into thinking … can’t blame them—

  Vera had emerged, looking fully at her daughter, and the girl was amazed to see her eyes trembling with tears. To help her, Annie was casual. —Poor Lazar, my guess is he’s a bee that bumbles into any flower. Anyway, he didn’t object to us both going walking with him. I suppose he’d invite a girl to bring her mother along if he thought that would help his pursuit.—

  —Perhaps he saw, but he thought it worth taking a chance that there could be a man who’d convert you to men. It’s surely natural, if you’re a man.—

  —Their arrogance.—

  —Not really. Maybe there’s a chance, always.—

  —That’s Ben, not you! That’s what Ben really believes, doesn’t he? You know I’ve had men. I used to bring them home to my room occasionally.—

  Somewhere in the house lies an old man who has lost the power: here, it’s time to talk. Vera overcomes the urge to touch her daughter, place a hand on her cheek, trace her features. It’s as if over thirty years she has missed the times to do so, she has always been looking elsewhere, turned away, while the girl grew and changed and moved into another self.

  —That’s why I don’t understand. My darling, how can you do without a man?—

  A plea, a cry.

  —Oh perfectly well, Ma! I can look after myself!—

  —I don’t mean that. Anyway, I don’t think you do, you have someone who looks after you, doesn’t she? Husband, wife, whatever she is. You’ve just said there’s never a fair division of labour.—

  —All right. Granted. Of course you can’t know of the other dependencies, how that works between her and me, just as it does between your kind of couple.—

  Vera was hearing her out with the gathering silence of a determination to speak, against reluctance to reveal oneself. —I mean the love-making.—

  —The love-making!— The amused, coaxing tone; her mother might have been an adolescent timidly seeking information.

  —I have to tell you, Ann
ie, I can’t understand how you can prefer it without a man.— Vera got up and went to close the glass doors that led into the house. In privacy she turned passionately. —Without a man!—

  —It’s wonderful. Let me tell you. A woman is like you, she knows what you feel, what makes you feel, and so—she does—instinctively she does what you want, she’s feeling what you’re feeling, at the same time. It’s not like that with a man, who wants his kind of stimulation while you want yours. Oh I suppose you’ve never made love with a woman, for all your independence—

  —Never felt in the slightest attracted to one. Though you know, you’ve seen, I’m affectionate with a few women friends—

  —But it’s men you like. Always men— There was an edge of judgment, the twinge of an old injury in the smile. —I suppose you’ve had a few more lovers I don’t know about. You’ve experienced nothing but men, men.—

  —Yes. I love men. I mean exactly what I’m saying: how can there be love-making without the penis. I don’t care what subtleties of feeling you achieve with all those caresses—and when you caress the other partner you’re really caressing yourself, aren’t you, because you’re producing in her, you say, exactly what you yourself experience—after all that, you end up without that marvellous entry, that astonishing phenomenon of a man’s body that transforms itself and that you can take in. You can’t tell me there’s anything like it! There’s nothing like it, no closeness like it. The pleasure, the orgasms—yes, you may produce them just as well, you’ll say, between two women. But with the penis inside you, it’s not just the pleasure—it’s the being no longer alone. You exchange the burdens of self. You’re another creature.—

  Annie was fascinated by and yet moved to retreat from her mother. —The beast with two backs.—