None to Accompany Me

by Nadine Gordimer

  After dinner there was the first of the awkward hours that were to follow each night in the next weeks. Vera customarily went to her private place, the enclosed stoep which was her study, in the evening, and Ben read in the living-room. Although the young man had just spent thirteen hours in a plane he was not tired, he would never be tired at night, he wandered about the living-room looking at books and pictures, picking up newspapers and the art journals Ben subscribed to, the Foundation’s pamphlets and offprints of articles about land laws and removals that overflowed from Vera’s study; he walked out into the night and rounded the limits of the garden. Vera at the living-room window saw him standing at the gate before the streetlights webbed in trees, the blur of an all-night neon sunset burning, away over the city, with the stillness of one listening to the turbines of life sounding distantly: a captured animal pacing its new enclosure, seeing and hearing an unknown freedom, out there.

  Kruger, the Okavango, the Cape. —Of course we’ll do some travelling together—naturally—but first I have to find you some sort of work. Have to be a responsible grandfather … What would you like to do? I can’t promise to come up with it exactly, but I’m prepared to try.—

  —D’you notice how the people we meet think I’m your son—you don’t look much like my grandfather, Ben!—

  Vera broke in with a cry. —And me? I suppose I certainly look like a grandmother!—

  —Well, do you dye his hair for him? How come it’s still black?—

  This kind of light sparring was the initial communication between Vera and the boy, Adam. —It’s always been black, black, never changed. Just as it was when I first saw him.— The boy doesn’t ask where that was, the youth of someone who is a grandmother is something unimaginable. But her remark succeeds in bringing a smile to Ben. —There are white ones if you look closely enough.—

  —What’d I like to do? Now what would I like to do? Vera? Ben? People are always telling me what I ought to do, I’m not used to these big decisions.— The three were sitting in the garden; he was at the age when he could sprawl in the sun for hours, perhaps just growing, completing the physical transition to adulthood, his penis secretly stirring under the warmth.

  —That’s why I’m asking.—

  —But I really don’t know.— Useless to tell them, hitch the road to Kruger, the Okavango, the Cape; even she, who was holding him in a look as if she knew, smiling with a quirk to the side of her mouth, would not let him go. She might have: but she wanted to please her husband. He had been quick to see that his own presence in this house was some sort of gift to his grandfather, she didn’t really want this grandson there. Yet he’d taken a liking to her; their sparring was an admission that she liked him, too, while both were aware he was not welcome. —Maybe I could do something at Vera’s offices, what she tells about the place sounds quite interesting. I’d meet people.—

  —That’s out.—

  He looked from Ben to Vera. She stirred in don’t-ask-me amusement.

  —Ivan specifically didn’t want that.—

  —Ben, surely Ivan’s told him.—

  —No I swear to you! He told me nothing.—

  —Because I got shot in the leg. He thinks anything connected with the Foundation’s likely to put you in danger.—

  —What crap! I could be blown up by an IRA bomb in London, couldn’t I?—

  —The incidence isn’t quite the same. Vera escaped with her life. Living here is dangerous, even this garden, this house, if people come to rob they shoot or knife as well, if you walk up the wrong street and there’s a demonstration on, you can get tear-gassed or shot; you’ll learn all about this, why it is like that—

  —I’m streetwise.—

  —No, much more than streetwise—you have to be. You have to accept there are risks you can’t do anything much about. Certain aspects of Vera’s work simply add a few more. Ivan wants to avoid them.—

  —Well, anything. Anything. It’s not meant to be a career for life, is it?— He hid in sulks his irritation with his father, with both of them.

  —All the same— Ben paused, to reject the too emotional ‘unhappy’. —I don’t want you to be bored.—

  He didn’t answer, sat there sucking at the hollow inside his lower lip. He knew they wanted him to get up and go into the house so that they could discuss him. He didn’t move. Vera rose with a leisureliness that challenged him, touching a plant, wiping greenfly off its buds as she left.

  —See you later.— Ben followed.

  In the bedroom she stood by while he changed into jeans and running shoes. Ben had always liked to run when something was troubling him; a good household remedy. Each has his or her own. Standing in underpants taking the jeans from the generous wall-cupboards the parents of her first husband had fitted, he still had beautiful, strong legs, the ankles and knees perfectly articulated, the thighs—so important if a man is to be a good lover—frontally curved with muscle under smooth black hair. She regarded him as if he were a statue; one of the works of limbs and torsos he used to sculpt.

  —He doesn’t really mean it, about working at the Foundation. He’s not disappointed at all, I assure you.—

  —Well, it’s the one positive answer he gave me.—

  —He wants to show he doesn’t take this whole mock exile seriously, whatever we do. It’s a kind of flirtation with us.—

  Adam went to work at Promotional Luggage. Profits were steeply down, with the recession and labour disputes, travel costs rising with the devalued currency, it wasn’t the time to take on unnecessary staff. But Ben knew he couldn’t hope to find anything else for the young man; his A-level achievements didn’t qualify him for something above the rank of junior clerk anywhere else, and where that kind of opening did happen to exist businesses were finding it expedient to Africanize. No one wanted to be seen to employ a white foreigner on some sort of sabbatical, even as a favour to a friend.

  Adam was too young to be a salesman—who would give orders for expensive briefcases to a boy with Pre-Raphaelite locks, Ben was amused to think.

  —Let him start at the bottom. Messenger and tea-boy. Like any black boy.—

  That’s Vera, of course.

  —Fax and automatic coffee dispensers now. You know that.—

  A place was made for him that hadn’t existed, in design and production, he could learn something there. Ben had an arrangement with his partner, to which Vera was not privy, to pay the salary himself. Apparently Ivan had not provided for Adam to receive any allowance in his banishment; he couldn’t go about penniless and it would have been humiliating for him to have to accept what would have looked like a schoolboy’s pocket-money from Vera and Ben. He spent most of the first month’s salary on compact discs for the player that was in his luggage. Vera’s house was filled with the one intrusion she hadn’t thought of complaining of in anticipation, to Ben. Many desperate voices, accompanied by a heavy beat that she heard without distinction as Michael Jackson, resounded from what had been Ivan’s room.

  Chapter 21

  Zeph Rapulana dines on board the Drommedaris now.

  He has moved more or less permanently from Odensville, where he built a home for his family in the temporary settlement area secured, and, leaving the backyard cottage, has taken a house in a modestly affluent suburb vacated by a white couple who have left in the latest count of emigration to America or Australia. What has been abolished along with the laws of segregation is the law and custom, more deeply entrenched than any law, that only white people could live in these pleasant areas. Anyone who can afford to pay the rent or buy property may do so now. Many whites who want to see racial prejudice abolished and have applauded its passing nevertheless comment high-mindedly whenever a black man or woman is successful enough in their—the whites’—world of professions, finance and business to move into one of the formerly white compounds. There are so many blacks living in degrading poverty, how can a black man live it up with a tree-filled garden, lock-up garage for his car, and neig
hbourhood security watch? For one to want justice for black people, they must all qualify by being poor. He ought to be living a dozen to a shack without light amid shit running from broken drains. He ought to be standing before a farmer’s door shut in his face, saying without menace, non-violently, we won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children. Never. Whatever you do to us. Never. And we’ll never penetrate your boardrooms, we’ll never enter and take the place behind the desk in the chairman’s office, don the robes of the judge, fit the uniform of the commander-in-chief.

  When Vera comes to have coffee with him they sit and compare notes. Vera is sharp-tongued about the patrons of the Drommedaris, teases him a little, in his position as an infiltrator of a new kind. He’s calm as the old kind. —Of course, underneath that smoked salmon stuff and the wine they keep pouring I understand they’re having problems in taking a black man seriously. Of course I understand that.— He is neither sarcastic nor facetious.

  Vera smiled. —‘I know the white man’.— And they laughed.

  —Well, I’ve been learning about him a long time.—

  —But you get on with them—not just amiability; I mean you get them to take you: seriously. Have your say in decisions.—

  —Slowly, slowly—yes.— He is a director on the boards of several finance companies, a development foundation, two banks. —I think I’m not decorative enough to be put in the window.—

  —Oh I don’t think so! My bet is they certainly counted on you being decorative enough, with your credentials from the housing commission, they thought that looks good, you don’t need to say anything round the boardroom table, you’ll lend them enough credibility for progress just by being there, and then they find they haven’t got a dummy, they’ve got you. I could have warned them.—

  —I’m just a schoolmaster who’s trying to educate them to diversify their excess profits into enterprises that will benefit our people whose labour made those profits. That’s all. Cheap bonds for housing, technical training instead of casinos, backing for blacks to get into setting up our own financial institutions—and the right kind of co-operation to make sure we don’t fail while we’re gaining experience. It’s like everything else with us blacks, Vera; fail, and it’s proof you can’t succeed because black can’t succeed. It’s a trap; give us funds and no access to expertise along with them. ‘See what happened? They can’t do it’.—

  —Probably we’re going to nationalize banks—and then?—

  He bent towards her with a gentle smile. —I think your politics are a bit different from mine, Vera.—

  She was sitting back in her chair with the coffee cup on the arm, legs stretched and crossed at the ankle. With him there was no haste in communication; in every encounter between human beings there is a pace set that belongs to them, and that will be taken up in its own rhythm whenever they are together. —Private enterprise … I think you’re getting me to see it your way, sometimes.—

  —The banks we’ve created will have belonged to our people already. Only the private aspect will change—there’ll be government men on the boards, some of the directors will go.—

  He? He’ll move on, as he did from the way he found to emerge from the Odensville affair, doing what was to be done when it had to be done.

  —I wonder what you really think of them. When you’re with them.—

  —People. Human beings, men like any other.—

  —Oh come on. That’s the ‘politically correct’ reply. And women? The few women I’ve met in that circle are not what I’d call like any other.—

  —Can’t think of any women … yes, there’s one.—

  —Poor thing.—

  —Well, yes, I suppose so. But I have to admit I didn’t notice it, how she was treated. Among us black men, too, it’s been usual. I suppose I’ve been conditioned from boyhood. Although I like to think I’ve resisted all that!—

  —You’re the least conditioned person I’ve met. I was quite wrong about you when I first saw you, hat in hand. I mistook dignity for servility. I can tell you that now.—

  He avoided personal references by withdrawing to himself. He filled his cup. —And you?— She put her palm over hers. —I mean would you say you are conditioned?—

  She knew he was saying he didn’t believe it was so, while he didn’t think they needed to be personal in this way; such a level already existed differently between them.

  —I find at the moment I need to be, more than I am. I have my son’s young son living with us.—

  Correcting the awkward definition: —Your grandson.—

  —Grandson. I’m unsure—of our position—you know? I don’t know what he expects, the right thing.—

  This was how he listened in boardrooms, waiting to unravel speakers’ motives, giving them time.

  —What I should be to him.—

  —You’re Vera.— His, the last word, no qualifications.

  She laughed and pulled a face.

  —What about the other children?—

  They had been thinking aloud over the news that pupils at black schools were out in the streets again, this time in refusal to pay examination fees. He took up in doubt: —I wonder why we call them children. Eighteen, nineteen, sometimes more than twenty years old, and that’s part of what’s gone so terribly wrong in our times. If the parents weren’t too poor to keep them in school when they’re small, if there had been enough schools to take them all in at the right age, as white children start their schooling, if they hadn’t been chased here and there, everywhere, all over the country in removals—if they’d really had the chance to be children like other children—they wouldn’t be young men and women treated like children now. They wouldn’t be doing the things that scare people so much, the things that young men and women do when they’re angry. This country got it all wrong.—

  —And we have to believe we’re going to get it right.—

  —A piece here, a piece there. It’s all broken up. You do what you can, I do what I can. That’s it.—

  Vera was looking at the palm of her right hand as if (to him) seeking to divine something there; but she was turning to the distraction of some blemish while dealing with uncertainty; she picked at the tiny grains of a couple of warts that came and went, from time to time, in that palm. —So it’s some sort of historical process in reverse we’re in. The future becomes undoing the past.—

  —You still believe history will do it through us. I believe we act through God’s will.—

  —I know. I know you do.— It was an atheist’s declaration of faith: in a man.

  They sat in unnoticed silence for a while, closer in their difference than they might have been in agreement, with others.

  Chapter 22

  When politics turns to gangster methods the vocabulary that goes along with these is adopted. The slang of the TV crime series people amuse themselves with night after night becomes the language by which planned killing of leaders and those close to them is termed. There is a hit-list, there are hit-men. Just like the movies—but these tough guys are not actors behind the get-up of balaclava helmets they wear, they are individuals convinced by others that they have a mission: to save this or that political ideology, racial or national formation, religious belief.

  It is only after an assassination of a leader has successfully taken place that the hit-list is released to those whose names it comprises. No one gives a ministerial or official police explanation for this, so that an explanation offers itself out of the very circumstance: those in officialdom who kept the list to themselves had among them some who were involved in compiling the list and providing the hit-men. But there are so many formations, so many intrigues, so many messianic claims for exclusive destinies not provided for by any Bill of Rights, that there could be any one of these responsible. If there is an arrest—and most times there has not been—the unlikely individual seems a strange being (produced in an unlikely period in the sense that nothing is like it was for so long) who could have served any of th
em. For although they squabble solemnly among themselves their yearning is the same, they yearn for the impossible (escape from history, Vera Stark would call it), the reinstatement of life as it was before. They are prepared to kill for that, although nothing will bring it back; assassination is an offering for which there are no gods left.

  Sibongile Maqoma is on a hit-list. A telephone call came while she was turning over some chops under the grill. Mpho, who always rushes to answer a ring in the evening in the certainty calls are for her, yelled through the sizzling to her mother, and Sibongile picked up the mobile phone she has resorted to, like her beeper, to make her life manageable. When she heard the slowly emphasized voice of an Afrikaner speaking English she quickly, with the free hand, signalled to Didymus, who was opening a bottle of beer, to go and listen in on the receiver in the living-room.

  There had been one or two abusive calls since she had become a member of a multi-party commission in negotiation talks. Pushed under the front door, a note written in straggly capitals called her a black bitch who should keep her cunt out of politics—but to be told over the telephone in that steady monotone (the man might have been reading a grocery order) you were listed to be murdered! If the Colonel had sent someone to talk to her, to tell her; but a telephone call!

  She rushed to the living-room giggling on a high note, shaking. Didymus and Mpho stared as if the threat must somehow show on her. —It was so casual, I felt like just saying thanks but my chops are burning—