My Son's Story

by Nadine Gordimer

  So he was the good husband, the good comrade because that woman was gone. He was alternately business-like and attentive—Aila’s side-kick, Aila’s entourage, Aila the hero, now—and morose, sitting alone at the kitchen table late at night, not because my mother might go to prison for ten years (I pestered the lawyers to give me an estimate) but because there was no more big bed on the floor, shameless as you walked in, a whore’s room.

  Aila’s mark was awesome on me: the little girl I sleep with treated me like an invalid, when fellow-students saw me, they saw the headlines in the papers: HAND-GRENADES IN GARAGE HOUSEWIFE LIVING ILLEGALLY IN WHITE SUBURB ALLEGED HARBOURED TERROR CACHE. My mother’s indictment in the guise of Aila had given me respite. I had stopped thinking about his woman, about him; the stranger’s remark suddenly reminded me.

  And now I, also, did something shameful. I couldn’t resist the compulsion. I don’t know why; I went again to the cottage. What did I think I was going to see there? Maybe I just wanted to make sure, sure. Maybe I couldn’t believe it; he, she and I have been bound so long. The side gate was padlocked. I climbed over it. The dogs at the main house heard nothing, didn’t appear. I went up the steps of the stoep as if to announce myself to her. I stood in front of the sagging screen door but did not touch it because I remembered it squeaked. A carton that had contained wine bottles lay split among dead leaves, holding two rain-swollen telephone directories. A window was broken and the glass had fallen inwards.

  No bed. A dirty square on the wall behind where it was; I remembered an ugly picture, hanging there. House-plants dead for lack of water. Two burst cushions spilling their guts in a corner. There was the buzzing silence of desertion. All the movements and syllables that had sounded there, all that had happened there, caught in confusion, eddying without sense, motes drifting within the walls, falling back from them. That’s what’s over. That’s the past, its dust not settled.

  I put my head in. The smell of smoke. Her smell. He came home smelling of smoke, he didn’t smell of the semen he’d given her. That bed. To paraphrase one of my father’s famous quotations (the Bible, this time?), that bed gave up the ghost.

  The sensation you expect doesn’t come when and where you seek it. I didn’t find exorcism then and there.

  Aila was applying herself conscientiously to the long lists of questions the lawyers, while planning her defence, gave her, and to the full account required of everything she had thought and done that led to the circumstances of her indictment. She made notes by hand and typed sheet after sheet. He sat across the table from her as they had done when he was the schoolteacher correcting his class papers and she was improving herself by correspondence courses. But if she looked up to ask something of him now, it was seeking the advice of a comrade more experienced in the pitfalls of preparing for a trial. He suppressed a wave of distress and denial that came over him every time, and answered her; she would nod in thanks, and scribble something in a margin. Her image on the other side of the book or newspaper in front of him penetrated the pages. The longer he waited to speak the fewer the opportunities would be; with every line she wrote, every consultation with the Defence, every visit of his comrades in the leadership, the preposterous was becoming the accepted reality, made so not only by the State, but by the lawyers, the movement, taking it as a fact: Aila, Aila a revolutionary responsible for her acts. Preparing Aila for what—he knew, he knew—only a revolutionary with total inner certainty, who has chosen, can withstand.

  And with a sense of stretching his fingertips at something that was disappearing from his grasp, he suddenly spoke as he handed her a cup of tea he’d brought to sustain her at her task.

  —What made you do it?—

  Late at night; she looked around the room to make sure they were alone, to see if the boy, Will, was there to give her support or credence—he was often a presence, wearing his headphones so that the music he listened to didn’t disturb her.

  She took her time. It even could be Aila didn’t feel obliged to answer; that, at last, the reproach she had never made would take this form. Sonny had a passing foreboding; but she spoke.

  —I understood.—

  He gazed at her; she seemed almost to transform into her old laconic gentleness.

  —What did you understand that you didn’t understand before, here? How could Baby—blatantly!—use her mother like that? I can’t believe it …I can’t forgive her.—With alarm he heard his voice hoarse—if the sphincter of tears failed, Aila would know they were not for her but because he was rejecting Baby. His daughter.

  —Nothing to forgive. She did nothing.—

  —That’s not true. All right—so it was the people you met through her. She exposed you. Through her.—(I’ll cast out my daughter for you, was passing between them in the pause. See, I’ll do that for you.) –Of course, it’s exciting, important, free, there, after the way we are here. Oh I’m sure. The compromises, the pettiness …they’re gone, it’s war, not getting by with your white neighbours to prove a point. But if you wanted more, there’s plenty to do here, we could have …at least …we could have discussed it.—

  —I don’t know whether I wanted to.—

  He waited.—Aila. Be active, or discuss it? Apparently you could discuss it with Baby. If you say she wasn’t the one to use you.—

  —You were so proud of her. Don’t speak badly about her now. Don’t spoil something for yourself.—

  He experienced a contraction of his stomach muscles in an emotion new to him, inevitable, the nausea of remorse, that always must be experienced entirely alone; he had spoiled so much. Aila drank her tea and he saw her focus, under stiff dark lashes, shift along a line or two of her written testimony, but she turned away from it as if for the moment the words held the wrong meaning. She looked at him and then suddenly began to speak like someone telling a story.—Baby and he take the child with them everywhere, you know. And he’s still so little. Meetings, parties—he’s up at parties until one in the morning. The first time, I was really shocked, I told them it was wrong, poor little thing. I mean, you and I …when we went out while the children were small, someone came to sit in with them, they were at home in their own beds by eight o’clock to get a good night’s rest. But one time when I arrived—I don’t remember whether that was the fourth visit or the third—they told me that they took the little one with them to a party one night and when they came home they found the house had been bombed. You remember that second South African raid over the border, Baby sent a message after the bombing of a safe house, reassuring us it wasn’t where they were living? Well, she did that because she didn’t want you—us—to worry; and when she told me, she made me promise not to tell you. But it was the house where they’d been living. If they’d left the child at home with a sitter that night—with someone like me …—

  Isolation is a sensation like cold. It took him up from his hands and feet through to the core of his being. If he had nothing left but to turn against Baby, who had escaped death a second time without his knowing, what place was he in, within himself?

  —That was it?—

  —I think so.—

  —Difficult to follow you, Aila. You leave so much out.—

  —I know.—

  —You ‘understood’.—

  —Yes.—

  —Can’t you explain? Revenge? If you’ve been getting a political education you should know that’s not an acceptable motivation in our struggle. Some mystical experience you’ve gone through, or what? Understood what?—

  —The necessity for what I’ve done.—She placed the outer edge of each hand, fingers extended and close together, as a frame on either side of the sheets of testimony in front of her. And she placed herself before him, to be judged by him.

  If he had been the one with the right to judge her. As her husband? As a comrade? The construction he had skilfully made of his life was uninhabitable, his categories were useless, nothing fitted his need. Needing Hannah. His attraction to Hannah belonged to
the distorted place and time in which they—all of them—he, Aila, Hannah, lived. With Hannah there was the sexuality of commitment; for commitment implies danger, and the blind primal instinct is to ensure the species survives in circumstances of danger, even when the individual animal dies or the plant has had its season. In this freak displacement, the biological drive of his life, which belonged with his wife and the children he’d begotten, was diverted to his lover. He and Hannah begot no child; the revolutionary movement was to be their survivor. The excitement of their mating was for that.

  But Aila was the revolutionary, now.

  When they drove together to the police station to report every day, the weird routine performed together seemed to him a possibility of the return to the domestic intimacy they had had, once. A strange return it would have been, but surely something from which they both began must be there, beneath whatever unimaginably changed circumstances between them. He was at home, now, as he used to be, once. The other circumstances made this possible: the cottage was abandoned; he had somehow been eased out of high position in the movement.

  He made love to Aila. But then he had never stopped making love to Aila, dutifully calculating the intervals that would not arouse suspicions that he was giving himself to some other woman. The difference was that now he was coming home to her, Aila, his wife, his Aila. She gave no sign of noticing the return of passion; she co-operated well—that was the only way in which he could describe it to himself. And he knew—now with his greater experience of what women can feel, in love—that she faked her pleasure. She was thinking of something else; or she couldn’t stop thinking, that was it, and if a man can’t drive out everything but consciousness of ecstasy in a woman when he is inside her, he is no man. Sometimes, defying this, urging himself, he was no man, sank from her like dead flesh. She was not embarrassed about him, or for him. She gave him a pat on the hand:—Doesn’t matter.—

  Doesn’t matter. Aila said that and he lay beside her with his heart beating up in resentment against Hannah. He had listened entranced to the things Hannah said; they seemed to speak from the centre of life, which no-one else he had known had ever mentioned. But the centre of life wasn’t there, with her, the centre of life was where the banalities are enacted—the fuss over births, marriages, family affairs with their survival rituals of food and clothing, that were with Aila. Because of Hannah, Aila was gone. Finished off, that self that was Aila. Hannah destroyed it. Aila was gone, too, Yet she lay beside him alive. Something bigger than self saves self; that had been the youthful credo he had taught his shy bride. He listened to Aila breathing, giving a little snore, now and then, and smelt the too-sweet odour of her skin creams warmed by the rise of her body temperature in sleep—the cloying familiarity in marriage, flee from it to the clandestine love wild and free of habit—and he longed unappeasably; nothing, nothing was there to stanch the longing for everything he had fled.

  Aila the comrade. Exhibit No. 1 in court was an RPG-7 rocket-launcher, two RPG-7 rockets, three RG-42 hand-grenades, two limpet-mines, two FM-57 land-mines, and a length of flowered curtaining material. It had been bought in the Oriental Plaza by that other Aila, who sewed curtains for her son’s bedroom. Aila sat between police officers with her head up, composed, a smile and lift of eyebrows for Sonny and Will in the front row of the public gallery. Sonny had no rational control of his feelings at this period come upon his life. Daylight—the daylight of courtrooms and police footfalls, the huddle of lawyers and the shuffle to rise in court as the judge entered the canopied bench—dazzled his solitary, night mood. But this at least was his place, the unchanging ground of struggle across the veld. With a lance of pain, pride in this woman, Aila, broke through. He scarcely noticed the sudden agitation in the boy. Will was whispering something in his father’s ear; Sonny jerked away his head irritatedly, concentrating on the process in the well of the court. His son was trying to tell him that the RPG-7 launcher and rockets were not in the cache he saw unwrapped from the curtain off-cuts in the storeroom.

  There’s no air in my life. The polished corridors of police stations and prisons have been the joy-rides I’ve been taken on with the people I love. Once when I was a schoolboy one of my father’s white friends invited me to spend a Saturday with his sons at his farm. Enkelbos, it was called; I still remember the sign at the gate one of the sons jumped down to unhitch. They went there every weekend. They had a rubber dinghy on the dam. They had scrambler bikes and we took turns roaring round sending dust up to cloud the pollen scent of the black-trunked wattle trees that were in thick yellow bloom; it was the end of July and winter was melting on your cheeks.

  I need air. Again the polished corridors, the company of policemen watching sullenly, the bodies of strangers shifted up for along the boney benches of the public gallery, the eagerness with which we follow the expressions of the lawyers, try to penetrate the distancing that the judge, somewhere a man inside his red robes, keeps between himself and all he sees and hears. People downcast by trouble under the lofty spaces—how many times have I gazed up to the fans in the ceiling, stirring the trouble round and round where no pollen scatters renewal. Staleness. All my life, since we left our old home outside the mining town, I’ve been breathing the dead breath of these places where life and freedom are supposed to be protected by the law.

  Now it’s Aila there in the well of the court, and my father sitting beside me as she used to. I felt dulled, I felt like letting myself slump against the stocky old black man asleep sitting at my other side with his hands folded on his stick. Let us sleep together through justice or injustice being done, baba, we don’t know what they’ll decide is just or unjust, we don’t know what will come of the judge’s measured hand-movements, taking note (of what?), the lawyers exchange of document files, the Clerk of the Court so contemptuous of facing us that he doesn’t realize he can be seen picking his nose, the computer operators fingering their fluffy hair-dos, the policemen creaking in and out on the balls of their feet, bobbing heads in obeisance to the judge’s bench like people perfunctorily crossing themselves as they leave a church.

  The old man beside me began to breathe stertorously. I’m so conditioned to these places that I automatically cow before their authority, and I nudged to wake him before a policeman would come over and reprimand him. I did it to save him fear but he was startled anyway, and his abrupt recovery jolted me alert, too. It was as if I had dropped off during a movie and found myself recognizing, at the point at which my attention returned, a scene that contradicted an earlier one brought to mind. The exhibits were being displayed to the judge by the Prosecutor: the pineapple hand-grenades and the limpet-mines, the land-mines, yes—but here were objects I had never seen before, strange things described as an RPG-7 rocket launcher and two rockets. There was no object like these, no RPG-7 launcher or rocket wrapped in my curtain material in our storeroom. I almost jumped up and shouted to the judge. But my conditioning to prisons and courts kept me down. I tried to whisper to him, my father, but he, too, knows how to behave in these places if you want to get by. He shut me up. I was stifled, stifling with what I knew. I trod between the line of legs on the bench to get out. It was Pretoria, now, the Supreme Court in the Palace of Justice, not the Soweto court for blacks; that was only for her first appearance. I sat in the great entrance hall among majestic pillars with polished brass feet, under lozenges of coloured light that came steeply from stained-glass windows; their churches and their halls of justice are somehow mixed up, they see some divine authority in their laws. Everyone entering had to pass through a metal-detector arch and a body-search; I was confusedly aware of a gun pointed at me—a small black boy, whose female family were slumped, waiting, near me, was running about with a toy automatic rifle. Now a white policeman guarding the door of Court D pretended to be hit. The kid’s laughter flew up the vault with the trapped swallows as he scampered round this new playmate, while I sat and saw again, over and over, the lengths of curtaining unfolded, counted the dull-looking o
bjects one by one, the hand-grenades and limpet-mines and land-mines I recognized and I’d heard the Prosecution identify. I felt swollen, immensely important. I don’t know what I thought; that I had justice inside me, it would explode among them. Their lies and trickery, verneukery, their dirt would fall away from Aila and set her free.

  My father didn’t come and look for me. Not until the judge took his tea-break. Through the doors of Court D I heard the shout ‘Opstaan. Rise in court’ and the stir of feet and clothing and voices as people moved to come out. I felt I would choke. I stood up. Are you ill, he said. He looked as if this would be the last thing he could bear.

  I haven’t touched him for a long time; I clutched his arms. —The rockets weren’t there. That launcher thing. They were never there. They planted them, like they did the other things earlier. I tell you I saw, and they weren’t there.—

  He believed me at once but of course the lawyers questioned me. Was I sure? Was I in the storeroom all the time during the search, that morning? Wasn’t I in a state of agitation, excitement, anger? Yes, all those and more, believe me, my toes were curled rigid as my fingers in my fists and my shoulders were so tense my neck ached next day as if I’d strained a muscle. But I know what I saw, I could swear to it as many times as any court asked—I wished I’d written down a list of those weapons on a bit of paper and made those bastards sign it, that day, that day!

  When the lawyers were satisfied with my reliability and had come to a satisfactory assessment of my ability to stand up to cross-examination without being intimidated by the prosecution, they agreed that mine was an important piece of evidence. It brought into question the whole allegation that Aila had hidden or knowingly allowed to be hidden (you know how they put things) a cache of arms in our storeroom. In her second statement she had said she understood that what was to be stored in the storeroom was ‘disused office equipment’. She had not looked into what they left there amid the junk of a family household. On my evidence, if they had stored explosive weapons there, no RPG-7 rocket was among them.