My Son's Story (14 page)

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Authors: Nadine Gordimer

BOOK: My Son's Story
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—Well, that's essential. Of course I did it the other way round …you know, the other kind of books first. Poetry and stuff. I had a different idea of what's necessary. When I was your age. The wrong way round—He lifted his hands, seemed about to place one on the mound of my feet, touch me, but did not.—Ignorance.—
I was yawning uncontrollably, I didn't mean to be rude to him. I didn't know whether I was tense to get rid of him or I wanted him to stay.
—Will, you didn't hear anyone here tonight. You didn't hear anyone talking and you didn't hear anyone leave.—
After he'd said what he'd come for he continued to sit with me for—how long—a few moments, it seemed a long quiet time. Then he got up and went out softly, as if I were sleeping.
So that was it. Someone on the run, or an infiltrator from outside. Or there was a meeting with some of his people he doesn't want the rest to know about; since he's been home more, I've seen that he's in some kind of trouble with his crowd: these emotions don't have to be concealed in quite the same way as his love affair. There are long discussions with this one and that one—who come here openly, I don't have to pretend, for my own safety and his, I haven't seen them. There are reports in the newspapers speculating about changes and realignments in the organizations, including his, that make up the movement. That's his business; he doesn't need any complicity with me, beyond warning me to keep my eyes closed and my mouth shut. Which is already what he has taught me to do for other reasons. That's ended up being his only contribution to my further education.
Perhaps my mother said something to him about keeping an
eye on me while she's away, and he feels he ought to do that much for her. So he's sacrificing the nights he could be spending in the big bed on the floor. As if I would ever know what time he crept in, midnight or dawn, I'm young and when I sleep, I sleep. Only older people wait up.
Home every night. Is it possible it's because he wants to be with me? It's for me?
Every third day, at the agreed hour, he waited alone in the room for a call from Lesotho, where she had gone because her grandfather had died. The cottage was locked up. She'd left him the key. Of course she was often alone in that room but he had never been there without her before. He tried to read but could not; the room distracted him, beckoning with this and that. He was a spectator of his own life there; the edge of the table he often bumped against when he went, dazed with after-love sleep, to the kitchen or bathroom; the shape of the word processor seen from a particular eye-level, now viewed from a different perspective; the huge painting with all its running colours that was more familiarly felt than seen, since when he stretched an arm behind his head, on the bed, he came in contact with the lumpy surface of what she had told him was the impasto. An ugly, meaningless painting, to him; there is always something about the beloved—some small habit—some expression of taste—one dislikes and about which one says nothing, or lies. Also she might have taken into account his
background—lack of cultural context for the understanding of such work, so he had had to pretend (to protect each's idea of the other) that he thought it fine. Now he was alone with its great stain of incoherence spreading above the bed from which, at least, it had been out of sight. Of course, for her it was something handed down, like the old studio photograph of a bespectacled lady with cropped white hair—probably her grand-mother—which stood in a small easel frame on top of the bookshelves. These things belonged to a life not followed, a continuity set aside; somehow he never thought of her in connection with a family. She wasn't placed, as he was, whatever he felt or did, with wife and son and daughter in the Saturday afternoon tea-parties.
Some days the call was delayed. She used a post-office booth for discretion, and they had agreed he should not call her at her grandfather's house, where others were likely to be around to overhear. He saw traverse the empty bed the stripe of sun that used to move like a clock's hand across their afternoons, over their bodies. Once he tidily took off his shoes and lay down on the bedcover's tiny mirrors and embroidered flowers. He must use the time to return to the problems of his relations with his comrades; this was the room, after all, the only room, where such matters could be examined openly; no fear of anyone taking advantage of frankness or admissions. But without her, Hannah, it was a stranger's room, a witness; while the house without Aila was unchanged, as if Aila were simply out of his way in some other part of it—maybe it was because the boy was still there, he and the boy among all Aila's family trappings.
He lay on the bed, a tramp who has broken in. He got up and wandered, looking at the jottings in Hannah's handwriting, but did not read open letters addressed to her. And then, the telephone: and with its croo-croo croo-croo it was their room
again he was padding over intimately in his socks, to hear her. Each did not use the other's name (for discretion); there was always a lot of smiling and laughter, and certainly she must hear in his voice that he was at once sexually aroused by the sound of her, but on this day after the initial pleasure there was an urgent break, out of which she told him:—Don't be alarmed …not good news. I've been P.I'd
4
—I think.—
—Oh my god. How d'you know?—
—A letter came yesterday. I'm
duly informed
I must apply for a visa. But I'm sure it'll be all right.—
—Have you told London?—
—I spoke to my director right away. They're already working on it. And several people here … By the time I've wound things up I'm sure it'll be fixed. I couldn't come back for another few weeks anyway—I've got to decide what to do with the old house, the books—I'm giving away the furniture, such as it is, but the books …and the papers …the papers must be preserved. What d'you think? They want them for the little archive here but … I'm inclined to believe I ought to look after them—
Agitation was invading his whole body.—Listen. Something must be done at
this
end. I'll find out.—
—Don't, don't. Please don't. I don't want you to get mixed up …—
An unexpressed struggle between them hummed across the distance. He severed it for both.—But you must come back, you must come back.—
When he had put the receiver down, it seized him: because of me. Because of this room, it's happened. But she was gone. He was desperate not to be able to pick up the receiver at once and tell her, it's because this place has been an everywhere
and they know it and they think you've been seduced—not to lie in that bed but to run as courier for the jailbird and his cause.
But when they talked again on the next third day he could not tell her; he could say nothing over the telephone. He could not tell her how, playing chess with his son to steady his nerves and enable him to think rationally (thank god Aila wasn't there, thank god he wasn't alone) he examined and discarded different ways to set about getting the order against her re-entry rescinded. He tried out, in his mind, taking one of the comrades into his confidence, a militant, worldly priest whose liberation theology would include an understanding of a man's responsibility for loving, inside or outside conventional morality. Father, I need advice. But no. A prisoner of conscience, you sit in detention, on trial, convicted for the liberty of all your people. That conscience takes precedence over any conscience about a wife and family left to shift for themselves, and over any woman you have need of. The comrades might know about her; probably did. But as an irrelevance. The struggle is what matters; and he and they are at one in dedication to that. Nothing that could be seen to deflect his attention from the struggle should be evidenced in him, who has even given his daughter for liberation. Particularly in the present phase, of factionalism. He thought of the merchant, by colour one of their own, who gave money—as insurance for a future or maybe out of real conviction, a Bakunin—but who also must know high government officials who would woo his support for their policy of privileging a middle class; perhaps he was the man to approach. He thought of the white newspaper editor who was challenging the government, front and editorial pages, over suppression of press freedom, and was too influential among whites to be refused meetings with cabinet ministers. A small favour might be asked
of him … But newspapermen—they sniff out the perfume of a woman the way certain creatures (the schoolmaster picked up such oddities of information in his reading days) can detect the presence of truffles under the ground. ‘Sonny' the platform speaker ex-political prisoner and Hannah Plowman, representative of an international human rights organization. Next thing, there would be a reporter at the door, and if he himself were not there, well, the son would be better than nothing. Will would be asked if he could say anything about the refusal of a visa to this friend of the family who monitored political trials.
As a hypochondriac runs to his doctor with every personal problem transmuted into a diagnosable ache or pain, he went to the lawyer who had represented him during his detention and trial. Metkin looked like a rabbi and listened as his client thought a psychiatrist would listen; in this presence of contemporary and ancient wisdom, divination, surviving between the telephone and intercom on a desk, Sonny felt humiliation as he might have been experiencing some physical urge. He was explaining that he wanted to hand the whole matter over to the lawyer; he himself could do nothing to help anyone in conflict with the authorities. This person had no-one else to speak for her, within the country; she was not in contact with her few relatives, and they were not the sort of people to act in this type of matter. Whatever the government did they would believe was justified.
But he saw in the lawyer's face that he had explained nothing, and he tried once more to evade the complete understanding there. He sat back in the chair on the other side of the desk and looked into eyes black as his own, the eyes of old races. —She's an invaluable person.—
Despite the unwelcome understanding of the lawyer he felt relieved—when you are in a political trial every hidden motive,
every vestige of contradiction, every hesitation of purpose must be confided, so that you may be defended even against your own high principles, the dangerous licence of confidence cannot be revoked. The matter was in hand—the lawyer's soothing phrase. For results, one must be patient; and as she said, she could not come back for some weeks, anyway …
Right from the first day she had been less alarmed than Sonny; he realized he had discounted the preoccupation of her feelings at the loss of her grandfather, who had been also a father—and mother—to her. She was back there sorting the old missionary's papers and simple possessions, sorting through her childhood, unable even to point it out to him in passing as he had done the place in the veld outside Benoni, to her, when they were driving by. Action on her behalf was being taken at home and in London. He was kept busy planning and running workshops—‘resistance education' (the name he coined for it, approved)—in shanties and mud churches, under the guise of local club meetings, since the National Education Crisis Committee was restricted by a ban, and in the spare time he would have been able to spend with her there was the quiet house, thank heaven, with only the boy around. And Will was less hostile, sometimes it seemed even possible to touch him. Ah, without women, what is always subliminally taut between men is relaxed. The boy was a man, almost a man. He could be trusted; hadn't he proved he could be trusted, he would not even meet your eyes to show he remembered. If told to forget he had heard someone visit the house he would do as he must.
The men who had come that night sought to form a cabal (how poor and melodramatic the political vocabulary was) to oust certain leaders. They were ‘putting out feelers' to individuals from several organizations to see who was ‘like-minded'—sidling euphemisms. They had not succeeded in gaining a recruit;
but they read a certain distraction in ‘Sonny' as reason to take the chance that he would allow himself to forget they had come, and give no warning to anyone.
 
 
There was something on the stoep. A bundle.
As he stopped, coming through the bougainvillea which concealed the side entrance to the garden, he saw an object; suspiciously—explosive booby traps as well as ordure can be placed on the doorsteps of political prisoners' friends. Coming closer, he made out a sleeper—some meths drinker must have found the deserted cottage convenient to camp against—then, seeing that the sleeping bag was new and a man's hand (young, white, with one of those twenty-four-hour military format watches on the wrist) was visible over the hidden head, stopped again.
Who was Sonny to intercept an intruder. How could he account for himself, approaching this cottage, key in his pocket. He had better go away. Come back later. The telephone would ring and not be answered; he called out as if the place belonged to him—What do you think you're doing here! Hey!—
The hand flew away from the head. A young man struggled out of the bag, unembarrassed, with a sleepy glance of recognition, confirmation.
Sonny had never seen him before in his life.
The young man circled his shoulders in their sockets to ease stiffness and breathed deeply. He had pollen-coloured spiky-cut hair too short to be tousled by sleep, a woman's pretty nose and long-lashed grey eyes, and a man's dark strong growth of a few days' beard. He half-smiled, and nodded, as if his man had arrived as summoned, on time.
—This is private property. What do you want here?—This person knew him; must have seen him in newspaper photographs.
Or it could be on video as one of the Security Police's film stars. He believed he had learnt to be alert without becoming paranoid, but the place where this intruder was waiting—waiting for him, clearly—her cottage, their room, to which he would return again and again, unable to keep away, and the move—the entry restriction timed to get rid of her without arresting or deporting her—these circumstances experience entitled him to interpret as put together by the people who knew all about him, the majors and sergeants who had interrogated him in detention, watched him through the Cyclops's eye of his cell door in prison, and were aware, without seeing, when she took him into her body in this cottage. He, like all his kind, educated in political struggle, knew them, too; the majors and sergeants. He knew what could be ready to follow the circumstances: re-detention, blackmail—not with money, between police and revolutionaries there is a higher exchange, the selling of trust. Not a domestic affair, telltattling to the wife that you're playing around (their kind of vocabulary) if you don't answer questions satisfactorily. They know ‘Sonny' wouldn't betray his comrades for that; the wife knows about his blonde and she's the submissive type who would forgive him, anyway. Then what? What? His woman in Lesotho; but if they had wanted to strike one of their dread barters with him (we'll detain her for the political confidences you've made to her, unless you give
us
some confidences)—if they wanted to do that, they would have kept her in the country, not shut her out!
The young man was standing there, the jeans, the sneakers, the haircut, like any roadside figure thumbing a lift; but in front of her door.—We'd better go inside.—

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