My Son's Story (17 page)

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Authors: Nadine Gordimer

BOOK: My Son's Story
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But I was serious; fed up.—Why should I go on living here as if it's all right to make a nice little corner for yourself—(I didn't say ‘with a nice little girl'.)
She was watching my lips as if she couldn't believe what came from them. Her alarm made her shrink and age, just as pleasure at the tea-party with a prospective daughter-in-law had made her soften youthfully.—We're going to need qualified people. Bush fighters won't win the economic war.—
Where does my mother get that kind of jargon? From him, no doubt; or picked up along with the baby-talk in homely visits to Lusaka. It's not her turn of phrase. She and I don't communicate like that.
—You're valuable, Will.—
I know what she's saying: don't leave. Don't leave me. Don't leave us. She won't let me fight. For my people. For my freedom.
I've never thought there was any guile in my mother but I suppose she's a woman, after all, some sort of sister to my father's blonde, since he's fancied them both. And circumstances have brought out the ability in her, as she's been changed in other ways. Perhaps to show me how she depends on me she's taken lately to asking me to drive her around (I've traded in that bike and bought a ‘nice little' Japanese car second-hand because the girl's parents wouldn't let her ride clinging to my back). She's going to meet a friend or one of the doctor's patients has invited her to visit—as I remarked, she's become more independent of my father, in her simple way. I drop her at a shopping centre or a street corner convenient for me to turn back. She says she's only a step or two away from her destination, it's not worthwhile to go right up to the entrance. So she doesn't press the dependency too far; it's carefully calculated. She doesn't need me to come and fetch her home again—there's a bus, or the friend will drive her, she assures. Poor woman, I've
got the message. Once when my way was blocked by a truck just as I was about to turn the corner, unobserved I saw her walking not up the street on the side she'd said she was going, but round the opposite corner in a different direction. She might have mistaken the address; but it also crossed my mind that the whole outing was a pathetic lie, she had no friend, no planned visit, she just wanted to show me she cannot live with him, without me.
 
 
Not all the perfumes of Arabia
.
Why him?
The question came back again and again, acid burning in Sonny's breast. It was not quite the same question. New, different, now. Not as if he were to have been the only one. Several comrades were visited that night, or some other night. He knew, because he and they had compared notes privately before taking the matter to the executive. But the suspicion, that had had to be dispelled by a show of leadership, had been set in circulation against him, alone. Why him? Why should it find substance, some confirmation in comrades' minds? There was no suggestion that this could take place in relation to the others who had been approached by the disaffected.
Unreliable
. What shadow had been cast, from where? Behind him, around him; all turned in his mind and burned in that place under his breast-bone. Not even Hannah's soft padded hand on him could still it.
Hannah. They knew about Hannah. They knew what had been going on a long time, now, since prison—they were men, some of them lovers of women—which means they took their chances when these presented themselves. But he was not a lover of women, in that accepted sense—a weekend or a night when a woman looks at you in a certain way in another city,
and you come home and forget about her. Revolutionaries, activists, are whole men and women; only human. Such marginal encounters have nothing to do with dedication and dependability.
But Sonny never had been that kind of man. There were no flattering flirtations or one-night peccadillos of manhood to ignore, in his record. He lived in intricate balance an apparently permanent double life. Seriously; he managed it and evidently would not relinquish it. They knew what a good wife for a revolutionary Aila was. And they all knew who the woman was. Useful. She was not afraid of police and prisons, danger by association. One of themselves, in a way. But only in a way; not directly in the movement, certainly not acceptable as party to deliberations, decisions and tactics, and therefore not—most important—subject to discipline. He knew that. Sonny, who had been the most disciplined of men, knew that about her, however close he allowed her to come. And to come close to him was to come close to the movement. He knew he was responsible for that; and of course he was aware they knew it.
He began to discern a shadow cast from Hannah. His needing Hannah. He had not told his peers—who had shown their confidence vested in him—about the man he had found sleeping on her stoep, the man she sent with an intimate password he couldn't refuse to acknowledge, whom he fed and guarded—yes!—not knowing who he was or what he was doing, some piece of adventurism, probably, Hannah had been deceived into.
And they knew about it; that was the explanation. He had lent himself to an action—some sort of mission that his movement had not authorized, about which it had not been informed. Some—the disaffected—knew, and that was why they thought it possible to approach him. And others knew about it, as well as that the approach of the disaffected had taken place.
So why not a triple life? If a man of his old and proven integrity could withhold information from the movement to which total dedication was due, loyalty was the letter of faith, he also might be vulnerable—open, like a wound—to disaffection.
Better to be vile than vile esteemed, when not to be receives reproach of being.
He hated to have coming up at him these tags from an old habit of pedantry; useless, useless to him. In a schoolteacher's safe small life, aphorisms summed up so pleasingly dangers that were never going to have to be lived. There is no elegance in the actuality—the distress of calumny and self-betrayal, difficult to disentangle.
He was reinstated. Yes. But that that term should ever have had to be used in reference to Sonny! Nothing to be proved or disproved against him, no charges, a shadow. Yet reinstated as the others, the disaffected group, were, as if he were in the same category. Perhaps nobody other than himself saw it that way. Leadership held its hand over him; that was enough. Whereas with the disaffected there was a deal. He was present at caucus meetings where the terms to be offered for the sake of unity were discussed. But he contributed nothing. He, who always had had such clear and influential opinions, leaning forward on his hands, his eyes seeming to gather and synthesize the elements of a decision diffused among voices and motives, before he would speak—he was not ‘party to' the bargaining under which the disaffected were dealt with. His comrade in the Chair deferred to him with a glance, now and then, taking off his glasses to make the space of a pause seem to be for this trivial purpose. An old friend; they had exercised in a prison yard together. Every time he did feel the urge to intervene with an opinion, an impulse of irrational anger swamped it, but that business was over and done with, nobody wanted to hear accusations,
now. Self, self; since when was he obsessed with self. But it was their fault, his comrades sitting where their lives and sometimes deaths were in each other's hands in this abandoned warehouse space, enclosed by eye-level clapboard according to someone's confused idea that all meeting places, however diverse their purposes, were businessmen's offices and boardrooms. The empty water cooler stood as the neglected fish tank did in the Benoni yard when Will and Baby let their pets die …the anger was controlled, his attention wandered: self, self. Suspend them now, someone was saying, they can't come and sit here with us!
—Let them go back to the rank and file, man … What do they think.—A small black man with the pock-marks of poverty and the scars of warders' punches spat the match from the corner of his mouth.
—Most of them are the rank and file, so?—
—No, no, only three. The other two are exec members.—
—Comrade Chair …Comrade Chair …can I just …—
—Caleb is the only one we see. The other—he hasn't attended a meeting for months.—
—On a mission!—
There was laughter, and private exchanges.—What sort of people are we sending around? Did you hear that?——Some mission …he goes about claiming …I'm telling you——Makes statements supposed to come from us—
They had their break from tension and then were rapped to order.—This is not a circus, comrades.—
One who always could be counted on to hold the floor as if he were eyeing in a mirror his plump handsome face, himself his own appreciative audience, began a prepared speech.
—Comrades …we are facing a grave crisis whose ultimate consequences we may not foresee … the forces of democratic
action are threatened from within … this Trojan horse, can it be stabled … I ask you … challenge … is it much different from the truck appearing innocently to be carrying its load of cold drinks, that attracted our children into the street and gave the fascists who were hidden with their guns behind the crates a chance to shoot our children down …Are we to watch our words and stick out our necks to the knives of potential traitors here in this place where we meet to put our minds and hearts in the struggle …are we to sit with Judas in our midst … I say, and I dare to speak in the name of our masses, who sacrifice their bread in strike action, who risk the roof over their heads in rent boycotts, our comrade workers who sweat and toil in the dark of the mines …let us cast out these betrayers of the people's trust, the unity that is our strength, let them do what they will, but we cannot compromise the struggle that is sacred to us—
Stale, stale. Sonny was unaware that he was slowly weaving his head from side to side, away from the rhetoric and melodrama of this performance given by a man as brave as he was vain—how to explain that someone who had endured without breaking seventeen months in solitary confinement could talk like this; that such conviction should be expressed in this overblown way associated in everyone's ears with cant. He believed the disaffected should be expelled; better a split than a schism within. But now he was filled with distaste at the idea of associating that decision with bombast. He clung desperately to the straw of truth in plain speech, plain words; he did not speak.
But someone had to. A movement cannot be run by fastidious abstention. He should know that. The leadership that had protected him (from nothing! from a shadow!) and who exhibited him at their side, already had arrived in private at a compromise that would be carried by the majority.—Comrades—the chosen spokesman looked round quietly at them all and fingered along
the ridge of his jaw-bone a moment while attention gathered—I propose, in the best interests of unity combined with the security of the movement, we do not publicly expel these men from the executive. We suspend them, with their agreement—leave of absence—until the executive is automatically dissolved at our Congress. They will not attend any further meetings, they won't present themselves to speak on our behalf in any capacity. They won't give press interviews. We know they'll agree to this …the whole business will become a non-event.—
Everyone waited for another to speak.—They'll remain members—the rank and file as well?—
—Yes. No split. They're being re-educated—if anyone should bother to ask.—
The orator threw back his head and stiffened an heroic profile.—Comrades, I bow to the majority.—
Sonny left with his proper companions, the leaders. A hand took his elbow.—It's the way to deal with it, Sonny.—
—You know what I think.—
 
 
Hannah was expecting him to come and report. He drove to the cottage, parked in the lane, pushed through the shrubs where piebald-breasted Cape thrushes flew, whistling, before him. Involuntarily his hands went out to them. There was a pile of cigarette butts beside her, he tasted the smoke of her anxiety dry in her mouth. He told her the decision and then went back to his account to describe how the meeting had gone, leading up to it, paraphrasing even with a little exaggeration for her wry amusement, the speech that, at the time, had embarrassed him. She knew, as he did, the real qualities of that man—what did pomposity matter, despite his sudden yearning to have it otherwise—nothing is simple in a life and a country where conflict breaks up all consistency of character. They'd often talked of
that. With particular reference to Baby—his Baby. Her frivolity, the way she manipulated through charm, and the purpose suddenly (who knew?) surfacing in her—the strongest purpose in human society, to change the world.
To change the world. Trumpeting words again.
He leant over and emptied the full ashtray into the garden. —That's enough. No more.—
She pushed the cigarette pack away.—I promise. Not while you're here.—After a pause:— …So it's all right. Somehow. Everything's the same again.—
—Not the same.—He tried to answer her smile but his was a strange grin that stayed and stayed with him under the contradiction of those dark thick brows bunched over blackly intense eyes.

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