My Son's Story

by Nadine Gordimer

  They’ve all left, the performance is over. He came out of the cinema into bright daylight; and me.

  Imagine the prestige he gets out of it among his comrades—his daughter, skipped the country to join the Freedom Fighters. Dedicated in the tradition of her father, who ‘recently narrowly escaped death’, so the papers said, when the police charged a cleansing-of-the-graves gathering where he was speaking. ‘Sonny’ the popular figure in resistance politics, whereabouts often unknown since sometimes he’s obliged to go underground. During the boycott campaign against yet another of the elections where we can vote to put people of our colour onto councils whose decisions can be reversed by whites, he didn’t sleep at home at night because that’s the place and time the police would come for him; suits him fine—oh but then I suppose the police know as well as I do where to find that big bed right there in the room as you enter. So he wouldn’t have been able to use his perfect alibi to spend nights with her. I suppose she wouldn’t let him, anyway. She’s what the comrades would call ‘a good girl’, and they don’t mean she’s not easy with men. They mean she can be relied upon to know the priorities. My mother’s not in the struggle so my mother is no priority. When he looks at me as he sometimes does I’m supposed to remember that.

  If his woman were not a good girl it would be all right for me to loathe her.

  I got my parents to pay me to go away for a week as the celebration of my success in matric. I went down to Durban on the motorbike and picked up a girl on the beach the first day. It was easy. Some of the beaches are open to all of us now. So I’ve lived with a woman for six days, fucked her and slept in the same bed with her, and don’t want ever to see her again.

  Sonny realized only too well he had the advantage. Aila being Aila, she couldn’t be expected to take the sacrifice of her daughter (that was how she would see it) as he did. Aila did not have access to his kind of acceptance of Baby’s choice to begin her life, the resource discovered in himself from which his responses came, now: his political commitment. He could quite see it: for Aila, all was loss. There was no gain. Although her eyes had changed—he noticed her dark-grained lids were slightly lowered, she no longer looked out with the ready gaze of the young Aila—she still saw ‘not living for yourself’ in terms of a schoolteacher’s extra-curricular activities of social uplift in a little community across the veld somewhere. He had left her behind, there.

  Poor Aila.

  But nobody loved Baby more than he did, nobody! The boy was ‘her’ child; Baby was ‘his’; these things were never admitted in the virtuous convention of an obscure little schoolteacher’s family in a dorp ghetto. But it always had been so; even then, he knew he was not the socially impotent male whose only positive contribution to his outcast people is to beget another male to carry on a family name. What had Aila done to assuage his anguish at Baby’s attempt to end her life before it had begun? Nothing. Silence. Silence upon the other silence. Comfort and understanding he had had to find elsewhere. ‘I could do nothing for him. We were finished.’ Hannah’s flash of perception suddenly passed from the ominous focus it had had for him at the time and picked out of his darkness, Aila. Lit upon her. Aila could do nothing for him. He could do nothing for Aila. Thank god she had the boy. Such a disappointment in other ways, at least there was this to be said for him.

  First there had been Sonny’s discovery that the individual decision to lead a protest party of children is only an amateur’s beginning, a half-conscious sign of readiness to learn disciplined political action. Then, in the process (and he retained a pedagogue’s faith in the learning process as a never-ending one) there came the inspiring satisfaction of action arising from the decisions of like minds. Then the bonding of prison, a brotherhood those in the safe world can only mimic with their play-play ordeals of ordination or initiation, taking the habit and vows of chastity or getting vomit-drunk. In solitary confinement there is no choice but chastity and abstention. No sacrifice or celebration. The secret signs between initiates are messages tapped with a knuckle to be received by an ear pressed to the other side of a wall. The blood brotherhood is exchanged when hymns are taken up from cell to cell to accompany an unknown to the hangman. Sonny had heard this dread choir. He had told Hannah about those dark mornings, while he and she were waking to the song of birds. Confessed everything about them. —How is it for a man when those hymns don’t mean anything to him? What would happen to me, if I were going off to die like that, with no prayers and no god …I lay there while it got light …—

  —I’m told they sing freedom songs.—

  —Then the warders come and kick the cell doors and swear. I’m not talking about fear … Normally, people like us never think what it must be like because as far as we’re concerned criminals, murderers, hang. We don’t. But here, where politicals are hanged, when you’re inside and you hear the singing, you think of things that didn’t ever have to enter your mind before.—

  The learning process continues.

  Although a liberation movement strives to act rather than react, because its existence is a phenomenon of opposition to power it is constantly forced to respond to what those in power do, to move in the foreshadow of what the power is planning to do, and to predict what it might or might not be led to do by any pre-emptive action. ‘Taking into account changing circumstances’ is a tenet like that of a farmer taking into account the weather, and it covers as many factors as there are signs in the heavens, variables in the four winds. Sonny’s late development of political sense, grown slowly out of a priggish and subservient morality, ensured that his judgment never lost touch with principle, while his unhesitating return to the struggle after detainment and imprisonment ensured that he was capable of bold pragmatism. With these credentials added to his intelligence and gifts as a speaker, he had emerged from among others to the company of decision-makers. There, the combination in his personality was reflected in his position: considered as one of the radicals, he was yet reassuring to the cautious; he could be used to press decisions in a form acceptable to them. There was an exhilarating war-time will to consensus on the strategy and tactics of attacking the government and its supports, military and economic, throughout the world, as well as in the country itself. Comrades who were arrested were immediately replaced by others ready to do their work; the interchangeability of leadership again and again defeated bans and imprisonments. Under the endless disruption of a hounding State—files seized, offices burned down, comrades become political nomads sleeping when and where they could—the huge problems of mass organization continued to be debated and tackled. How to emphasize a constituency among hoes and factory overalls without losing the chance to draw in the people the government were co-opting with the penny sweetmeats of middle class instead of rights? How to get rid of corrupt, government-protected councillors without the people taking the decision into the hands of their own anger and killing them? How to keep proper contact with the youth and street committees who wear the T-shirts and carry the colours but go beyond the approved methods of struggle and give the State the opportunity to charge leadership with incitement to murder? What issues—population removals, strikes, stay-at-homes, boycotts—would be most effective, pursued where, at what period?

  There were also internal problems. Sonny brought them all home—to Hannah, that is. Hannah understood the inferences behind the positions various individuals took; he and she argued over and unravelled them together. Comrades who were united in a line of thought sometimes apparently unaccountably diverged. Someone whom Sonny had been sure of:—He didn’t back down, he just sidled away.—The question was of alliances; he and Hannah were sitting outside her cottage in the garden, which they had to themselves because the people who lived in the main house were overseas.—I can’t agree we should ‘take each case on its merits’ until we’ve decided exactly what are the minimum areas of policy agreement necessary before a group should be accepted.—Sonny’s distended nostrils were his familiar sign of tension.—Only when
we confront these people with that can we judge whether they’re coming in with a genuine commitment or with the intention of influencing our objectives in some way. All smiles, and the next thing you’ve got a palace revolution. That’s the problem with a broad alliance—which we want, which we pursue, we must have—each organization has the right to work in its own way, but that doesn’t mean a licence to creep in and subvert. It’s been used for that before, it’ll be tried again. We can’t have it. Can’t risk it.—

  Her soft breasts rose and fell in the low-necked dress she wore to enjoy the sun, a water-colour wash coloured her blonde skin, but he was staring for her response and did not see her. —I think that may be an exaggeration. It’s not as if this lot represents any great constituency. To attempt anything like that, they’d have to have strong support on the executive, they’d have to have people with influence—people among you—

  —But that’s exactly what worries me. Why does someone on the executive with whom I’ve discussed the whole matter in principle, again and again, before the actual situation came up—and we had exactly the same point of view—why today does he say nothing?—

  —He’s changed his mind. Doesn’t necessarily mean someone’s changed it for him.—

  —Yes it does. Because we’ve always been so open—you know—between us, it would be natural for him to tell me he’d changed his mind. Say why, discuss it.—

  She sat up straight and picked ants off his sleeve.—Who was it he was along with?—

  —A couple of people he hasn’t been particularly enthusiastic about before. If you can call it ‘with’; as I say, he gave himself away by saying nothing. I suppose it amounted to being with them.—

  —You’d better take off your shirt. Ants all over you; look.—He held up his arms and she helped him out of the sleeves. While she shook and slapped at the shirt he ran his hand back and forth in the hair on his breast, turned in upon himself.

  —Here, my love.—But he did not take the shirt from her and she sat down with it in her lap.—You don’t want to say what you’re thinking.—

  —No I don’t. But he’s ambitious …I’ve told you that before. Oh in the right way, I meant; he believes he could be used more effectively, he thinks he knows better how to deal with some of the forces against us. He feels he’s the one who understands big business. And he knows the mentality of the Afrikaners … But he’d like to be in the papers more often … You know?—She laughed at his reluctant realization of this.—If he could gather supporters, a faction around him, he might just feel justified in pushing somebody else out, at the top—

  She continued for him:—And maybe there’s a way to do it.—

  —But what a way! This is the crowd who wanted to put up candidates for the regional council elections, eh. We had to work to persuade them to call it off.—

  —Are you going to talk to him?—

  —I don’t want to before I’ve talked to others …if there are others … flush them out.—

  —Be careful. No palace revolution, but no witch-hunt. Certainly not led by you.—

  On these days when they talked like this in a garden, there not by right but by calculation of someone else’s absence, as if theirs was a clandestine meeting of the other kind he so often attended, there was no love-making. Now while Hannah went on, speaking his thoughts as well as her own, in her private, perceptive way, his sense of where he was underwent a strange intensity. It was physical. He became aware on the very surface of his skin, his bare breast and arms, as well as through sight and smell, of this that was called ‘the garden’ hovering and pressing in upon him. The shadowless mauve of the jacaranda full-blown, ectoplasmic, near his face, tree ferns airing green wings spread over the pond tiled with lily leaves, the mist of live warmth from cut grass. A tingling peace on his nerve-endings, in his ears, murmured over by some sort of birds with grey tails rustling in a fig tree. As he sat with Hannah, the blurred rush of the chronology of living was halted for a while. The absolute of existence: an alpine pine hatched against failing light above the darkening earth, the bright tiny moths of the first stars flitting out of the hazy radiance of the sky. Clouds obscuring like shadows; the northern tree shivering at the tips of feathered branches as the heat waves of the day rose. The red-polished stoep and the rotting wooden windows, the room there, with the bed, the chaotic, disintegrated forms of the painting—all was stayed, as before a hand held up. Over the moment he sees the foreign tree, the element like himself that doesn’t belong, fall majestically, following its giant shadow that is falling across the man and woman in this garden, now. Where the saw has razed through its stout trunk the rings of its years are revealed under a powdering of sawdust.

  What was sensuously close drew suddenly away; he was removed from it and the isolation of his presence offered its meaning. A rich white man’s domain of quiet and beauty screened by green from screams of fear and chants of rage, from the filth of scrap-heap settlements and the smashed symmetry of shot bodies; he had no part in it. He did not know what he was doing there.

  He pulled himself out of the chair and went into the cottage; to that one room.

  Now there are things he doesn’t know. I wasn’t snooping, this time. I was alone in the house and I heard one of the women who come from the farms hawking mealies in the street. Her call hollowed my stomach; as kids, mealies were one of our favourite treats, my sister and I loved any hand-held food you could eat while you played. I heard that old cry GRE—EE—NN MEA-LIES right through the reggae beat of UB-40 on my cassette player, and I ran out to catch the woman before the cry became too distant. She swung the sack down from her head; everything about her was stockily foreshortened to carry weight —bare chunky feet, thick body, pediment neck, face and skull broadened for burdens. How black they always were, these women; black blackened by labour in the sun, it’s as if nature, which supplied our founding parents with the right degree of pigment to inhabit this continent, also supplies them with the camouflage under which to appear to submit to slavery. If you’re mixed you don’t have the protection. She strips the green leaves and spills the floss back from the cobs, digging her earth-rimmed nail to spurt milk from a row of nubs, because I ask her for young mealies, and her black face has no recognition for me, my half-blackness and this half-white man’s street we live in as one of my father’s political acts. She doesn’t know I have anything to do with her. So much for his solidarity with the people.

  And then I found I didn’t have enough money in my pocket to pay her. She smells the same, of the grease smeared on her red-black cheeks and the smoke of wood-fires in her clothes, but mealies have gone up in price since the days in Benoni-son-of-sorrow. One of our Afrikaans neighbours had come out to buy, as well, and she intervened to pay for me—Ag now, don’t worry, you can give me back later, it’s nothing—once you get one of them round to making an exception of you, there’s no limit to their neighbourliness. My mother’s dignity and beauty make our family an exception, although my father says exceptions change nothing, they merely confirm mob racism. For him, we are in this street to challenge the general.

  I ran back to the house to look for my mother’s store of small change, as my sister and I used to do. But there was no jamjar on the kitchen shelf. She was at work and would have her handbag with her; I thought there might be another purse or loose money in her dressing-table drawers. I know my mother; her sort of innocent, easily-found ‘safe places’ for things. Under the plastic tray where her cosmetics are ranged was a five-rand note and an envelope printed with the logo of a passport-photograph vending machine.

  I ran, again, to the black woman seated with indifferent patience under the blanket-skirt and the young Afrikaner wife, legs strutted wide on high heels, arms crossed under her breasts, smiling at me as if I were an athlete racing for the tape. She was another pink-and-yellow one. But not emancipated, like the other, not a prison visitor or a lover. She greeted me with a little sharp twist of the smile in the direction of the mealie vendor.—T
hey just charging whatever they think you’ll pay. I’ve told her, not fifty cents each, forty cents. So no, wait, that’s too much—you only owe one-twenty.—

  My father’s passport (he went overseas to a conference in Germany before he was detained) has been withdrawn, Baby left illegally, I’ve never had one. Neither has my mother. I went back into their bedroom to find what she had placed under her cosmetic tray. Photographs are not like letters, anyone may look at them. There were six. There she was, her neck held as you do when seated upright in the booth as the flash comes. The slightly defiant embarrassment with which exposure is met, because you never know for whom, in the world, your image is meant. Hair smoothed a moment before; wearing her seed pearls.

  Where is she going? Is she going to leave him? Wild idea …my mother! Where is there for her to go. There’s an accountant cousin who emigrated to Toronto a few years ago, at the Saturday tea-parties there’s news of him doing well.

  So I know nothing about her. Like him, I don’t know the invasion of unhappiness in her; the devastation left by him and his daughter.

  I don’t have a photograph of my mother. If I took one of these, would she miss it?

  Aila has her passport. She told her husband only after it had been granted and issued.

  He had the curious impression that she must have mentioned, indicated, her intention. A torn-off strip of paper buried in a pile of problems documented in his mind; the new series of bans imposed on his comrades had brought a crisis and reshuffle of responsibilities.

  There was a moment’s pause. His wife evidently decided—they both decided without a glance—to accept the lapse as genuine. Her taking the necessary steps for application with the absolute minimum of reference to him was what he would have advised; it was as if she had acted upon this. Aila was in the clear, innocent. She had done nothing beyond visiting him in prison as his wife and keeping a carryall packed with toiletries against his re-detention. But of course there was guilt by association, by loyalty. Aila had to show she was not involved; a stay-at-home wife. The affectionate diminutive by which she knew her only girlhood sweetheart, the chummy appellation by which crowds knew him—the police files’ alias Sonny—did not have to be filled in between first and surname on forms requiring name of husband. Aila’s best chance of getting a passport was to distance herself from him, his record, his activities, his life.