My Son's Story

by Nadine Gordimer

  It’s easy to refuse to ask for things. But he knows I can’t speak—to my mother; I can’t refuse to be in the know, with him.

  I’m not a child. If people come out of prison, if they’ve been lopped off, lost; there’s love. Isn’t there? It’s a way to make up for anything, so people say, from the time you’re a kid. Adults. In church, in school; in sex magazines. How to love, all kinds, all love. She comes out of the bathroom and smiles goodnight at me, I’m too old to be kissed unless it’s a birthday or some other occasion, and she goes into their bedroom with her hair in her shiny plait down the back of her dressing-gown. They sleep in the same bed, but does he love her, after he’s come from the other one? I never used to think about them—him, my mother—that way. I don’t want to think about it now. I don’t want to think he pretends she’s pink and thick and soft; as I pretend, in dreams, that I’m doing things to them, the blondes in full-page spreads I tear out.

  Sonny was not prepared for a visit granted to someone monitoring for a human rights organization. Friends and even relatives who had applied to see him had been denied permission; political comrades dared not show themselves for fear they’d be locked up, as well. For three months he saw no-one from outside. Then he saw only Aila, and once or twice the children were allowed to accompany her. That was as he had expected. He knew he was on his way to prison from the days back in the coloured location of his home-town on the Reef when he had led his pupils across the veld to the black location—as he still called those places, then. Or if he didn’t know it, he should have; he realized this as, instinctively taking up one form of political action after another, he understood that the mystery of the meaning of life he and Aila had vaguely known to be contained in living useful lives was no mystery. For them, their kind, black like the others, there was only one meaning: the political struggle. (As he loved the magnificent choices of Shakespearean language, the crudely reductive terms of political concepts were an embarrassment to him, but he had to use them, like everybody else.)

  Family matters. It was the rule in prison that only family matters could be discussed during visits. Well, these were what always had been discussed between Aila and him. He asked if Will was managing to keep up, in maths. If Baby was being helpful or spending too much time at parties. Aila reassured him; everything was all right. The very look of her conveyed that to him; at home, indeed, everything was the same; her black hair smoothly coiled, a necklace chosen to pick out a colour in the elegant tweed jacket she had sewn for herself. Her beautiful lips carefully drawn. The same; that sameness seemed to recede from him the more they talked about it, about family matters. And he had expected to yearn for home. The silences between Aila and him that were so comfortable, natural in their closeness, at home, were now a real silence without communication of any kind. He had been taught, in the tactics of the struggle, that it was possible to use a private, oblique language to receive information from intimates, but Aila didn’t seem to catch on. She was calm but he noticed she held her arms close to her sides as if to draw away from the presence of the warders who flanked him. What private language? They had had love-names, tender and jokey euphemisms for what was hard to express, key words that recalled events in their life together or the antics of one or other of their children—who could expect Aila to put love-talk to the use of a prison code?

  The stranger from the human rights organization had no family matters, with him, to confine herself to. He didn’t know how she managed to get permission for such visits, but it was clear she had somehow obtained it and already seen several of his comrades. She conveyed this ingeniously in an abstract vocabulary that the two warders, blinking dully and even yawning, could not follow and clearly soon ceased to listen to. He didn’t know what she had been told she would be allowed to talk about; presumably only to ask him if he was receiving adequate food, exercise periods and medical care. Talking about food she was actually letting him know that in another prison some of the comrades were on a hunger strike, and apparently innocently relating the weather report she was able to indicate—remarking which cities were receiving heavy rainfall—where many other comrades were held. When she began saying how very stuffy it was, by contrast, in Pretoria, she quickly noticed he was bewildered, straining to follow, and gazing at him in a pause, a silence of greatest aliveness reaching out to him, drew him to realize she was telling him she had been to the Supreme Court where others who were detained when he was were now charged.—And in crowded places it’s going to get hotter.—She had narrow blue eyes, the kind that do not have much depth or variety of expression, like the glass-bright eyes fixed so realistically in furry stuffed toys yet which hold attention by their surface colour. He eagerly understood she was passing a message that he might expect to be charged soon.

  A stranger has no love-talk, but she was the one who unknowingly found the way to connect him with home, with the possibility of home. It was a casual remark following on a question about how he was passing the time, which he could not answer because a warder woke and intervened, saying talk of prison matters was not allowed.

  —Well, I suppose you find sermons in stones.—A bit breathless at having managed at least to hand on some of the information she had been given by others, she jerked her head shyly at the confines of the walls.

  He grinned to receive this, another kind of message, she was almost certainly not aware of; elated to be able to recognize it.—And good in your kindness in coming to see me.—

  The young woman was not graceful or well dressed—not in the way he liked, in a woman, that gave a woman like his wife class and breeding, even in the ghetto. But what does that matter. Sonny had had to change his mind about so many things, as his life changed, as the very meaning of his ridiculous name changed—first a hangover from sentimental parents, then a nickname to reassure the crowds at rallies that he was one of them, then an addendum to his full names in a prison dossier: ‘also known as “Sonny” ’. A common criminal with aliases.

  Hannah. She introduced herself like that at once; a prison visiting room is no place for formalities. It was only later, when he met her outside prison, that he saw how she had been the first time she came to visit. Head and shoulders, the portrait was, that he kept with him everywhere, in his mind, as a photograph is carried between identity documents in a breast pocket. It must have been a cold June day outside—but prison always gave the impression of cold, anyway, swept clean, bare, with only hairy floating filaments in a cone of light, alive; from the breasts up, as she appeared behind glass above the wooden barrier, she had prepared herself with layers of garments, loose-sleeved knitted things over some sort of canvas waistcoat and several T-shirts whose clashing colours overlapped at the neckline. She had eased a striped scarf and freed her broad, matt-white neck in a gush of warmth (a retouch of the picture that came from subsequent experience of her presence without the separation of glass and wood). Her lips were quilted by the dry cold and paler than a soft pink face whose colour changed with a kind of patchy radiance as she steered double-talk past the warders. A big face whose bone structure was not evident. Two small cold-reddened pads of earlobes appearing and disappearing under rough-cut curly hair. Blonde. Of course, with that skin colouring. Very blonde. But not consciously so (as so many women with that attribute tend to be); her attention on more important things. He could not reconstruct how she had looked full-length, walking away from him after a warder. The lightly freckled calves that remained sturdy right down to the ankle, bringing her towards him, were not any fixed image, but recurring through the pattern of their meetings, moving; always now, not then.

  She came to the trial. It was her professional duty. She was often there; when he and the others with whom he was charged filed up from the cell beneath the court and turned smiling to look for relatives and friends in the gallery, she lifted a hand in reliable greeting. Aila could come only occasionally, she was receptionist to an Indian doctor at his city rooms in the lower end of town, and on Saturdays, when he did no
t consult there, the court did not sit. The doctor was generous in offering her time off, but Aila was conscientious, it was an article of faith between Sonny and her, part of her loyalty and support for him, in prison, that they would not let the State destroy the discipline of their daily life. When she could come she brought him jackets and trousers fresh from the dry-cleaner—as no longer a detainee but an accused on trial without bail he was allowed such humanizing privileges, and it was a tactic, displaying high morale to the judge, to confront him day after day with alleged revolutionaries looking like businessmen. Aila knew Hannah Plowman, who was monitoring the trial—the young woman had kindly come to the house once, while Sonny was still a detainee, to offer her organization’s help—but they did not sit together in the visitors’ gallery; the young woman had her colleagues, people from the churches, representatives from foreign embassies, a colloquy exchanging mouth-to-ear observations and analyses of how the Defence’s case was going. Aila sat among the other wives, mothers, fathers of the accused, big peasant women in crocheted hats who rested deformed feet out of shoes worn lopsided, young pregnant women with defiant profiles under beaded lovelocks, grey-woolled old men wearing Church of Zion badges. Sonny would pick her out at once, there in one of her white blouses with the bow looped through her string of seed pearls, the plastic folder from the dry-cleaner neatly arranged across her lap so as not to crease his clothes.

  At the tea-break, when the court had risen for the judge to retire, the colloquy of observers surged forward sociably along with the relatives. Couples embraced across the barrier of the witness box but it was not Aila’s and Sonny’s way to kiss on the mouth in public, their intimacy always had been too private for exposure. She leaned on the barrier and he held her hands folded together in his; and then she released herself, her eyes so brimming with dark, so shining and solemn, and handed over the dry-cleaner’s bag with explanations of stains that couldn’t be removed, as if this were the most important exchange between them. And they talked of family matters, although there was no restriction except political discretion on what they might say softly to one another, for these few minutes, here. Every other moment they were interrupted by his putting an arm out behind her to shake hands with a fellow prisoner’s relative, or he would have to turn away—gripping her wrist or upper arm, through the cloth, to keep the precious contact with her hidden self—to talk to one of the observers about some point they ought to make when seeking support for the Defence among influential people abroad. Sonny had to share out the brief interval of the judge’s tea-break like this because he had become spokesman for his fellow accused: the studious ex-schoolteacher had a way with words.

  Will came, and Baby, when the trial continued through the school holidays, and Will, so tall already, eyebrows beginning to grow together in a crossbow, just like his own, kissed and hugged him, laughed, didn’t want to let go. But Baby cried, and an extraordinary distress came over Sonny. There in the babbling company of the tea-break, the court where police stood at every exit deceptively sluggish as dogs who will attack at the first move, he was overcome by what he had done, got himself into this prisoner’s dock, going to be shut away in a cell at the end of the day’s hearing; suddenly possessed of an urge—jump the barrier, take this poor girl-child of his and break out. Aila was at work; the children had been brought to court by one of the lawyers. The young woman who was monitoring the trial, who had been once to the family house, appeared at the girl’s side and comforted her, smiled away Baby’s embarrassment; and Sonny’s panic died down without anyone noticing his moment of weakness, more shameful than the natural emotion of a daughter whose struggle was only with adolescence.

  As the picture of the first time he saw her—the young woman monitoring the trial—was reconstructed only later, so the meaning of the moment when she came to comfort his daughter was interpreted by him only later, growing in its power over him, a sign. It was then that it began, that it was inescapable. Needing Hannah. He could not think of what had happened to him as ‘love’, ‘falling in love’ any more than, except as lip-service convenience, political jargon expressed for him his decision to sacrifice schoolmastering, self-improvement, and go to prison for his kind. A spontaneous gesture quite in the line of her professional concern for prisoners and their families: she walked across the gallery of Court A into a need that clanged closed, about the two of them.

  It was the creation myth of their beginning. That it was not recognized as such at once, by them, added to its beauty. He was a political activist on trial for promotion of boycotts and participation in illegal gatherings. Police videos were shown by the State prosecutor where the accused was speaking on the platform. In other gatherings his identification was disputed by the Defence: Counsel made everyone but the judge laugh when he dryly drew attention to the fact ‘plain to see on his face’ that this accused had a distinctive feature—his eyebrows. But the lighter moments in evidence and the cheerful atmosphere of airport reunions at tea-break were the ‘humanized’ part of a process whose purpose was to send these men, who already had spent many months in detention, back to prison as convicts; part of the processing of all opposition to the State pulped into prison. Sonny, like his comrades, was preoccupied with writing notes for the lawyers to use in his defence. Under the effort to recall precisely, exactly, where one had been, whom one had seen, what one had said on occasions over the three years on which the State based its case, all immediate impressions, however indelible, extraordinary, were thrust away.

  Sonny was sentenced to five years. On appeal, before another judge, sentence was reduced to two.

  —It’s bearable.—The first thing he said to Aila when she was allowed to visit him before he was transferred to maximum-security prison.—It’ll pass before we know it.—There had to be objectives to make it pass.—Baby’ll be working for her matric—I’d like her to have some extra coaching when the time’s near. I’ll certainly get permission to do some study, myself.—He gave instructions on many practical matters—but didn’t want it to sound like making a will, he was leaving her for only two years, not a lifetime. She took the instructions as supports to hold, until his return, the life they had made together. They filled the visit with a rapid, determined exchange of plans.—Not five, remember; only two years.—They smiled at each other continually. When it was time for Aila to go he discarded the ritual—expressions of confidence that she would manage, admonition to take care of herself—he could have taken refuge in to disguise the parting for a definitive period of their lives. This parting between them deserved more than that. He said, Write to me, Aila, you must write to me. She did not speak. She put her arms round her husband and kissed him on the mouth, in front of the warders. He saw that, not to shame him, to strengthen him, she pretended not to see the tears rise in his eyes. He saw that as she walked out she put up a hand to set a stray strand of her hair to rights, as well.

  Happy for battle.

  Aila wrote every month; about family matters. Five hundred words. That was the limit prison regulations allowed. The letters always ended ‘Lots of love from all of us’. One prison day that was just like the last there was a letter in a different kind of envelope, addressed on a typewriter. It was from her, Hannah Plowman. Inside, he saw her handwriting for the first time, that voice which speaks from absence. Just a note to say how relieved everyone was (this he read as referring to the reduced sentence; in the know, she was well aware he was lucky not to get even more than five years). Anything we could do (the inference: her organization) to smooth the way where he found himself, or to assist his family, he had only to tell his lawyer. The last line of the single page abandoned the corporate ‘we’. This letter ended: ‘I know you’ll come out happy for battle’.

  He realized the wonderful phrase must be a quotation and he was stirred, intrigued to know from where, from whom. There was a message for him in the three words even beyond their aphoristic meaning, which, in itself, unravelled his whole life—how could she, a stranger, poss
ibly have divined that, in his quiet, schoolmaster’s being, joy had come first only when he stepped out and led chanting children across the veld to face the police! The message beyond that extraordinary prescience—that would enlarge upon it, confirm a language of shared reference between himself and the writer of the letter—was obviously something she assumed he would understand. Whoever it was who had said or written those three words must represent something particular not only to his present situation in prison but to a whole context of thought and action in which that situation was contained. The phrase didn’t come from Shakespeare. Of that at least he thought he could be pretty sure although he could not reach up to the familiar shelf in the glass-fronted bookcase for verification. There were so many gaps in his education although it had seemed awesomely high to the old people who kept his teacher’s training certificate framed in the kitchen where they could always see it.

  The phrase filled, for a few days, the hours that were so hard to fill, left over from the disciplined programme he had set himself in his cell—deep-breathing exercises, running on the spot, study, reading. Prisoners were made to keep the bedtime of chickens and children. The cell lights were extinguished early and he had not yet succeeded in being advanced to the grade where he would have permission to keep his on for night study. Happy for battle. He lay on his bed in the dark and sounded over in his mind that phrase, so simple, so loaded, audacious, such a shocking, wild glorious juxtaposition of menace and elation, flowers and blood, people sitting in the sun and bodies dismembered by car bombs; the harmonized singing coming from somewhere in the cells, and the snarl of a police dog leaping at his face, once, in a crowd.