My Son's Story (21 page)

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Authors: Nadine Gordimer

BOOK: My Son's Story
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The hearing was not at the great grey block of the city magistrate's courts in the district of the other great authority, the mining corporations' headquarters, where already an explosion of the kind that could be caused by the objects wrapped in curtain off-cuts had one day taken place. The court allotted was across the veld in Soweto. They travelled in the lawyer's air-conditioned car sealed like a diving bell from the mouthing noise and crowded faces in the combis that nosed past close and fast, and the huge shaking transport vehicles coming and going, crossing to industrial sites rearing up off the highway. In between, a green pile, the remnant of reed-beds, parted under gusts set up by traffic. The lawyer changed cassettes in his console dashboard and there was no conversation. Will sat on the back seat behind his father's head.
In the trampled veld where one area of Soweto ravelled into another the courts enclosed a quadrangle and their only access was from the verandah that ran along all four inner sides; red brick and shrubs, hangover from the old colonial style when the forts of conquest became the administrative oases, ruled into geometrical lawn and flowerbeds that demarcated the gracious standards of the invader from the crude existence of his victims. The lawyer left father and son at once, among people like themselves; drifting, standing, leaning against pillars, clustering around doorways from which they scattered to make way for the purposeful rumps of court officials. Waiting. All, like them, waiting to see a face that had been obliterated by uniforms, armoured vehicles and blind doors to break your fists on.
They were Sonny's constituents. He had taught their children,
he had roused them to demand their rights, himself had disappeared into prison for them. But he never before had come, like them, to wait humbly for someone of his own flesh and blood caught up in some incomprehensible disaster. (Wasn't her flesh and blood mingled with his forever in the body of their son, trailing beside him.) These old women drawing snuff through their nostrils, mothers of murderers, these young women, painted and dressed to remind the car thief of the desires they provoked, these others, weary against the wall, swathed about with babies under blankets, and these hawking old men shrunk in baggy cast-off suits—it did not matter if they were waiting to see a common criminal or, like him, to have produced,
habeas corpus,
a prisoner of conscience (Aila! In that role!). He was one of them, now, in a way he had not known. Attending the trials of comrades was no preparation for this; there the solidarity of purpose made one's presence a defiance of the legal process. But to imagine the freedom songs and salutes for poor Aila!
The lawyer had gone to establish formalities and find out in which court she would appear. It was a long wait and at first the father and son walked again and again along the four sides of the verandah, as people do while expecting to be summoned any minute.—Why doesn't he come back?—His father spoke, the son knew, only to break the silence between them in their isolation among other people's voices; he didn't have to answer.
—At least tell us what the delay's about.—
—D'you want me to go and see if I can find him?—
—No point, Will.—
The son jumped down from the verandah. The shadow of one side of the building bisected the quadrangle into shade and sun and he stretched out on the grass among the people who followed warmth there. It was a kind of strange picnic, where
patience substituted for holiday relaxation. Some people left the enclave and came back with fat-cakes and oranges, tins of Coke and fresh packets of cigarettes. Children played and fought furtively. Like them, he cupped his hand under a tap and drank. With the unconcern of routine, an employee in government-issue boots and overalls, singing a hymn in Sotho under his breath, unwound a hose and turned the flowerbeds into puddles.
Sonny stood above his son, made as if to prod him with the toe of his shoe.—Isn't it damp? (Smiling faintly.) Do you want something to eat?—
Neither wanted to be the one absent when the unimaginable moment came and she was brought into court. The father paused, with a gesture at the sun, went back to stand on the verandah. Perhaps he thought his son had dropped off, asleep; face up to the sky, eyes closed. But he was on his feet and leaping over the people on the grass before his father beckoned at the sight of the lawyer twisting his shoulders through the crowd on the verandah.—At last!—application's set for two this afternoon, though. The police agreed to bail but the Prosecutor insists on contesting … I know that fellow …big ego …it's absurd, but there you are. And by now no court's available this morning. I'll have to go to chambers and come back, there're urgent matters I have to attend to. But let's not waste time asking questions, just stick with me and say nothing. Will, take my bag. You're my clerk. Come.—
Gabbling in an undertone he hustled them along before him through a corridor and to a walkway enclosed in heavy diamond-mesh wire.—Just hang about. Take no notice of anyone. Point at me if you're asked what you're doing here.—
He strode up to the long counter in the room in which the walkway ended, again using his bulk to push through a confusion of policemen and other people competing for the attention of
the officers in charge. A gross tap dance of policemen's boots clipped smartly up and down past the father and son. Whichever way they stood aside, they were in someone's path. Exchanges and orders in the blacks' own languages and the Afrikaans of white officers flew about in the haste and impersonality of individuals dependent, each for his own fingernail hold of authority, on a hierarchy of command. Physical bewilderment made it difficult for the father and son to be self-effacing; both let themselves be buffetted as if they were inanimate obstacles some cleaner or workman had left lying about, while what they were witnessing through the wire mesh and the doorway was some intensely piercing awareness they alone could receive, because Aila belonged to them. Because Aila belonged to them, everything they saw happening to the other victims being escorted across the yard from some cell or Black Maria out of sight could be happening, out of sight, to her. Sonny himself had been brought at that trotting gait of one in handcuffs to register in the anterooms of trials. He had seen wretched, blubbering men dragged by warders, punched, where they bent double, to make them
opstaan jou bliksem,
by white bullies or shaken and shouted at by black bullies, he knew as a commonplace sight a barefoot man hobbled by ankle chains shuffling as a horror risen from the slave past into the memory of computers and the glare of strip lighting in the anteroom. But Aila, Aila, Aila had nothing to do with this! Aila in the neat, sweet-smelling clothes she sewed for herself, the seed-pearl necklace round her throat, her arms drawn to her sides in rightful, subconscious shrinking from the walls that held him—that was as far as Aila had ever been, ever should be, in contact with any of this. And the boy—what must it mean to be the boy, who knew nothing of it, not a particularly manly youngster, protected too much by his mother so that despite his intelligence and his
reading (yes, admit it, encouraged in
that
by his father) he knows only at second-hand the ugly, brutal temptation of the power of one being over another, he's been shown only the beauty and nobility of resisting it, father smiling calmly at his adolescent son brought to pay a prison visit. The father could do now what he had not been able to across the glass barriers, then: Sonny put a hand on Will's shoulder. To comfort. To be one with him.
The lawyer was flinging arms wide before the sergeant at the counter, displaying his black robe.—I'm her lawyer—you can't refuse me permission to consult with my client! I demand the officer in charge—He gave a quick imperious lift of the head towards the door, drawing the father and son to him. —My briefcase. Bring me my papers.—A round-bellied policeman blocked the way. But Sonny, like a traveller slipping into the foreign language he hasn't forgotten, argued with him wheedlingly in the idiom of prison Afrikaans. Will sidled by in the confusion and placed himself close to the lawyer. The lawyer signalled Sonny to keep talking and, indeed, the policeman's attention left him at someone's urgent yell to attend to something else. Under the harangue of threats to report the personnel to the Master of the Court, the Prosecutor and the Judge, no-one now questioned the right of the lawyer's entourage to be present.
—Ten minutes, that's all.—The commanding officer retained his self-respect in a sharp edict.
The lawyer gave no sign of accepting the condition and no explanation to the father and son; they followed him to a small partitioned booth at the end of the anteroom, people crossing and recrossing before them, and behind the bubble glass rippling distorted colours of other heads moving. The lawyer opened the door.
She was standing there smiling to greet them, husband, son,
lawyer. The wardress stood back from her, the policeman at a desk was scarcely a presence in contrast to Aila's presence. She wore one of her home-tailored jackets and there were the reassuring touches of her makeup (compact of self-respect made with Sonny, unharmed, thank god) but through the familiar beauty there was a vivid strangeness. Boldly drawn. It was as if some chosen experience had seen in her, as a painter will in his subject, what she was, what was there to be discovered. In Lusaka, in secret, in prison—who knows where—she had sat for her hidden face. They had to recognize her.
This woman hugged them ardently all in turn—Sonny, the lawyer, and then, of course, the one whom she had never let out of her embrace, her son.
Will, put on a tie.
God Bless Africa
I
Kaiser Chiefs
I stared at the back of his head on that drive and everything inside me shut down. I didn't think of anything, I didn't think of her, I was aware only of what was outside me. The stickers on the combis that cowboy lawyer raced and repassed. Sting and The Genuines playing on tape. The thick nap of the sheep-skin-upholstered seat burying my hand. It's all complete, round a vacuum, whenever I want it.
When I saw the man hiding his head between his elbows while a policeman hit him, and everything inside me opened up, loosed—caged fear for her, for myself, fear of life—my father put his hand on my shoulder. He knew. A hand came down on my shoulder. To demand something of me; to be one with him. And after she had come to me, saving me for last as she used to do—a secret between us—when she came to kiss
Baby and me goodnight, I saw her remarking—yes, that's the good old word—taking note: my weight, the softening round the chin and the belt slipped down under the beginnings of belly. No-one in our family's had flesh to spare. Not what she wanted me to be. But on the other hand, Baby has made her what Baby wanted
her
to be.
I didn't know what to say to her. I know that everything he had prepared he saw was wrong. Worse than that: she didn't need it. I could have told him that. I could have told him a lot of things he didn't notice, was always too preoccupied elsewhere to notice, things I understood, now; the visits to ‘friends from work' he was pleased to accept as relieving him of responsibility for his neglect, the frequency of her trips over the border—well, he'd already realized they weren't spent sentimentalizing over a grandchild, but he was mistaken in his demeaning decision (typical! of course only his blonde has the intelligence and guts to be a comrade-in-arms) that she was manipulated, beguiled into use by Baby and that husband. He must have seen, the moment the door opened and there she was. He must have seen she was not ‘innocent'; epithet that, I've heard him speechify, means denying responsibility towards your people.
He must have seen how she was. She kissed him like a young woman—I've never known my mother could be that way, I suppose now she's on the other side she knows what it's like not to be able to touch—but she didn't need comforting, there were no fears for him to still or tears for him to wipe. A lawyer is more than a husband and son when you are in the hands of those who bellow and beat a man who hides his head.
I
saw that. The lawyer, who had status here among the warders and policemen, he was the power, he was the one she was with. There were quick, voluble questions and answers between them, the ease of two who have established confidence in a matter of
survival; he was the only one to have seen her while she was in detention, the only one who knew anything about her as she was now. She didn't have time or thought to ask us how things were at home. My father made several attempts and managed to murmur privately to her—The whole thing's insane, don't worry Aila, nothing will stick.—He meant any charges made against her. She looked at the lawyer, then at me; her dark smooth eyebrows came together in a pleat above the softness of her pausing glance, she's always looked like that when there's something not understood, and which cannot be explained. She touched my father's hand.—My turn, now.—She and the lawyer laughed.
At two o‘clock in the afternoon, in Court B, Aila was charged with four offences under the Internal Security Act.—I think of her as ‘Aila' since I saw her appear in court, that day, heard her names called out to identify her. The charges included terrorism and furthering the aims of a banned organization. Aila was accused of being a member of something called the Transvaal Implementation Machinery, responsible for acts of terror in the region, and connected to a high command named Amos Sebokeng. She was alleged to have acted as a courier between Umkhonto weSizwe in neighbouring countries and a cell in the Johannesburg area, to have attended meetings where missions for the placing of explosives were planned, and to have concealed terrorist arms on the rented property where she resided illegally.
She came home with us. The lawyer eloquently produced all the good reasons why my mother—that exemplary wife and home-maker whose retiring nature and virtues as a conscientious worker were attested to by the highly-respected medical practitioner by whom she had been employed for years—should be granted bail for Aila. The prosecutor's objections were overruled
and ten thousand rands were paid; the lawyer had Dr Jasood's blank cheque ready, as the doctor's bandages had been there, in my father's absence, to bind up Baby's slashed wrists.
I have lived with Aila all the time while he, my father, was living his secret life and I have never heard of this ‘Machinery' or this code name for some high command: the secret life she was living. I've been the cover for both of them. That sticks! She didn't even need to confide in me; the silence she kept, for my protection, made me her conspirator, just as I've been his.
 
 
Aila happy for battle.
No-one knew better than Sonny that it is always a good thing to let warders and policemen see you laugh. It is difficult for them not to have some respect for one who can laugh while in their hands. But where did she get this from, know how to conduct herself, how to talk to her lawyer, put up a front that gives nothing away—not even to an old political lag who also happened to be her husband. Prison-wise. Aila prison-wise. His Aila; he made the claim to himself. In himself he ignored the crevasse of years he had opened between them and thought of them as Aila-and-Sonny, who together learned how to live, to whom nothing was faced, decided, dealt with that was not conjoined in the little house outside Benoni.
Hannah would sit him down to coffee, now, when he arrived, or offer a glass of wine. They were placed again as they were that first day in a coffee bar, before anything began, where it might never have happened—been rewritten.
—How is Aila? Is she in a state of shock?—
—She's home. They granted bail. Ten thousand.—
Hannah's downy pink face tightened painfully. He and she knew that a high bail price meant the prosecution's confidence
that charges would be upheld.—What's she supposed to have done?—
—Internal Security Act. The lot. Missions, a cell, courier.—
Yes, those trips to Lusaka that set him free to spend whole nights in this room, on that bed, behind them now.
—And the storeroom find, of course.—
The silence hung. Suddenly the blue of Hannah's eyes intensified as it did with tears. Whether Aila was a revolutionary or not, whether she had joined the struggle—and who should not rejoice at her choice if she had?—or been naively led by the daughter to acts she didn't understand, or was a victim of trumped-up charges and Security Police plants, the quiet, beautiful wife with the curtain material she'd sewn now used to wrap hand-grenades and mines was betrayed, betrayed.
Sonny was amazed; intruded upon. Hannah wept. The tears moved slowly down her broad cheeks and she did not turn from him or cover her face in decency with her hands. She had no right to weep for Aila!
—For god's sake, Hannah.—
But the tears welled and found their way over the contours of that dear face. She tried to speak, had no control of the muscles of her throat, swelling like the throat of a bird. Terrible, terrible, she managed to get out, again and again, flailing her head so that the tears flew. Some fell on his hands. He rose and across the table clasped her in his arms, they clung to each other in wild awkwardness, knocking over cups and sugar bowl.
When they lay on that same bed on the floor, close to the earth as they had liked to be, wakeful, the tides of blood flowing down behind their closed eyelids were washing them apart, the red waters of being widening between them. She did not speak but surely he could hear: this won't happen anymore.
Sonny knew a dire displacement. The wild embrace across
the table belonged to the meeting in the booth of the courts' anteroom.
 
 
I wonder when she went away. I didn't take much notice at the time; I suppose the signs were there in him but they passed for something else. The house, our life, was centred round Aila; if he were at home, where else should he be, now? Aila had to report to the police twice a day. Could he let anyone else take her there? One did as much for any comrade, put him first, before personal desires, in any crisis.
Not only the life of our house centred round Aila, the attention of the leadership focused on her now. My father's comrades were frequent visitors again—to see her, to give her reassurance of their support. Arrangements had to be made for her defence in the Supreme Court, from what sources the money would come, what counsel would be best for this case. A woman on trial—there was the question of what judge she might appear before, a punishing misogynist or one likely to be positively influenced by refinement, maturity and beauty, and how best the Defence might take advantage of such a possibility. The women's Federation brought cakes and the trades union Congress sent flowers.
It was through these visitors in the liberation movement that I heard she was gone—my father's woman. Quite by chance. Someone from Cape Town remarked in our living-room, ignorant of any connection between her and Aila's husband, that Amnesty International and other groups concerned with political imprisonment ought to be given more details about Aila.—We shouldn't wait for the trial to begin. Getting people overseas to know the background, telling them what kind of woman we have here, in Aila … I tell you who's the best person to do this,
Hannah Plowman, she's great—And someone interrupted: —But she's not here any longer, man. She's got some fancy job with the UN High Commission for Refugees, North Africa somewhere.—
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.

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