What was I doing there.
Yes, what was I doing there.
But I screamed: This is my father’s house. And before they could decide what to do with me I plunged back, back into them again and fought my way out. Some police had arrived at last (the wagging tail of an aerial on a van, over there). I was pulled free, saved by one of the same kind I had opened the door to when they came to search that house, to arrest him, to take my mother away. They dispersed the crowd but didn’t arrest anyone or seize the placards; and that Saturday night, while I slept in the bed of my current new girl, someone in the crowd returned and petrol-bombed the house, burned it to the ground.
I was glad to see it go.
The smell of smoke.
When I went with him to look at it, it was blackened bricks and timber, still smoking. A few of our people who had ventured out to stare stood back from us, as if in respect at a funeral. A kid was balancing himself on that plaster pelican—smashed—that had been a legacy from the white former owner of the property. The black policemen, sent after the fire brigade, to guard the place until there was some show of official investigation, tried to prevent us from entering what was left of the walls but were uncertain about their duty when he told them the house was his.
I followed him through shattered ice-floes of glass and soggy mounds of timber, clambered over contorted and melted metal, bent with him below the jagged shelf of lead ceiling that hung from a single support left upright. Your room, he said, making a claim for me, my life, against destruction, making sure I wouldn’t forget. But there were no categories of ownership or even usage left. What had been the kitchen, the sitting-room, the places for sleeping were all turned out, flung together in one final raid, of fire and water, the last of the invasions in which our lives in that house were dragged and thrown about by hostile hands. He went poking at rubble with his foot and dirtying his fingers tugging away wet remains as if there were bodies to be found and rescued. He was breathing fast and loud in anger or close to tears; or both. Sick, sick, they’re sick he kept hammering at me, only the onlooker and not the companion of his emotion. We emerged and our people who had dared to come out were still there, staring.
Their eyes fixed him. Their fear held them. I saw what it was—they expected him to have brought something out of what was destroyed. Something for them. He stood with blackened hands dangling open before them, he passed a weary gesture across his forehead that left a smudge he was unaware of. And he grinned. He grinned and his whole face drew together an agonized grimace of pain and reassurance, threat and resistance drawn in every fold of skin, every line of feature that the human face could be capable of conveying only under some unimaginable inner demand. It was very strange, what he brought them.
And then of course the old rhetoric took up the opportunity. We can’t be burned out, he said, we’re that bird, you know, it’s called the phoenix, that always rises again from the ashes. Prison won’t keep us out. Petrol bombs won’t get rid of us. This street—this whole country is ours to live in. Fire won’t stop me. And it won’t stop you.
Flocks of papery cinders were drifting, floating about us—beds, clothing—his books?
The smell of smoke, that was the smell of her.
The smell of destruction, of what has been consumed, that he first brought into that house.
It’s an old story—ours. My father’s and mine. Love, love/ hate are the most common and universal of experiences. But no two are alike, each is a fingerprint of life. That’s the miracle that makes literature and links it with creation itself in the biological sense.
In our story, like all stories, I’ve made up what I wasn’t there to experience myself. Sometimes—I can see—I’ve told something in terms I wouldn’t have been capable of, aware of, at the period when it was happening: the licence of hindsight. Sometimes I can hear my voice breaking through, my judgments, my opinions elbowing in on what are supposed to be other people’s. I’ll have to watch out for that next time. Sometimes memory has opened a trapdoor and dropped me back into the experience as if I were living it again just at the stage I was when I lived it, so I’ve told it that way, in the present tense, with the vocabulary that was all I had to express myself, then. And so I’ve learned what he didn’t teach me, that grammar is a system of mastering time; to write down ‘he was’, ‘he is’, ‘he will be’ is to grasp past, present and future. Whole; no longer bearing away.
All of it, all of it.
I have that within that passeth show.
I’ve imagined, out of their deception, the frustration of my absence, the pain of knowing them too well, what others would be doing, saying and feeling in the gaps between my witness. All the details about Sonny and his women?—oh, those I’ve taken from the women I’ve known. ‘Sonny is not the man he was’; someone has said that to me: his comrades think it’s because Aila’s gone. But I’m young and it’s my time that’s come, with women. My time that’s coming with politics. I was excluded from that, it didn’t suit them for me to have any function within it, but I’m going to be the one to record, someday, what he and my mother/Aila and Baby and the others did, what it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers’ days are determined by the struggle against thirst and those of dwellers amid snow and ice by the struggle against the numbing of cold. That’s what struggle really is, not a platform slogan repeated like a TV jingle.
He’s been detained again. I wake up before it’s light, these days, and I’m aware of him there, shut away. As if he were breathing in the next room in the house that’s burned down. I’ve sent him this but I don’t know if they’ll give it to him. It’s not Shakespeare; well, anyway …
4 a.m.
A bird sharpening its song against the morning
Furze of prison blanket mangy against the lips
Bird out there
Long ago we picked it up
Wired the tiny skeleton to make it bird again
Bird
Come, I’ll hold you cupped in my two hands
Stroke your smooth feathers
Open the bars of my fingers and let you
Go!
Through the spaces of the iron bars
Fly!
Come, lover, comrade, friend, child, bird
Come
I entice you with my crumbs, see—
Dove
Sprig of olive in its beak
Dashes in swift through the bars, breaks its neck
Against stone walls.
What he did—my father—made me a writer. Do I have to thank him for that? Why couldn’t I have been something else?
I am a writer and this is my first book—that I can never publish.
Also by Nadine Gordimer
NOVELS
The Lying Days
A World of Strangers
Occasion for Loving
The Late Bourgeois World
A Guest of Honour
The Conservationist
Burger’s Daughter
July’s People
A Sport of Nature
STORIES
The Soft Voice of the Serpent
Six Feet of the Country
Friday’s Footprint
Not for Publication
Livingstone’s Companions
A Soldier’s Embrace
Selected Stories
Something Out There
OTHER WORKS
The Black Interpreters
On the Mines (with David Goldblatt)
Lifetimes Under Apartheid (with David Goldblatt)
The Essential Gesture (edited by Stephen Clingman)
Notes
1 Clergymen.
2 Detainees’ Parents Support Committee.
3 A women’s anti-apartheid organization.
4 Declared a prohibited immigrant.
5 ‘Sun City’, actually a casino resort, is the name given by political prisoners to Diepkloof Prison, near Johannesburg.
Cop
yright © 1990 by Felix Licensing BV All rights reserved
eISBN 9780374707569
First eBook Edition : June 2011
Library of Congress card catalog number: 90-83232
First edition, 1990
My Son's Story Page 25