My Son's Story (23 page)

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Authors: Nadine Gordimer

BOOK: My Son's Story
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Beat at this gate that let thy folly in.
 
 
She mustn't think she can count forever on the child who used to put himself to sleep stroking his lips with the tail of her
long black plait. The plait's cut off, she's shorn, I'm a man. I thrust myself into women as my father does.
I got her out of the house, away from him. She took a walk with me. I wanted air. There wasn't anywhere much to walk to; three blocks down and you come to the discount liquor store, the take-away and the general store the Portuguese calls his supermarket, three blocks the other way and you reach the Dutch Reformed Church where our white neighbours pray on Sundays to their god who doesn't admit people like us in his house. We pass the houses of these neighbours; they've changed several times since my father moved us defiantly into this shabby suburb that seemed so grand to us after our place in the veld. More of our people have moved in as we did, some of the whites have gone because of this and been replaced by poorer ones who can't afford to live anywhere else. Most of our people are like we were—they've fixed up the houses they occupy—paint, tiled stoeps, fancy front door. The whites have the hulks of old cars in the patches that are supposed to be gardens, and cardboard where windowpanes are broken.
The neighbours who used to greet us (my mother such a real lady) seemed not to see us as we walked by; looked away. Perhaps they were different neighbours, I've never taken much notice, all the same to me. Or they had seen the headlines, and the newspaper photographs of Aila, living among them, one and the same woman who'd seemed such a lady you'd greet her just as if she were white.
Aila kept in step beside me. –Ma. You can't decide for me.—
—The whole business is my affair. It's not for the lawyers to defend me in any way they like. It's my right to instruct them, isn't it.—
—That's not what I mean. You must listen to what I mean,
you think you know how things should be for me, but you don't realize …—
—I do, I do. I don't want you mixed up in this. I don't want your life decided by mine. It's you who don't realize, Will.—
I stumbled against a stone, she waited for me. I said it aloud at last: –Aila.—
Her black eyes brightened and narrowed, she pursed her mouth wryly and amazedly. But fondly. She—only just—put her hand a moment on my forearm.
—Why do I have to say this again. Why must I be the one excepted, the one left behind, left out, why is it assumed—by you, by him, by Baby, everyone—I haven't any part in the struggle. Why is it just accepted I'm the one who lives the sham normal life you've all rejected, I'm to be happy on the edge of the white man's world of big business, money, going to be smugly settled in a year or two in some big firm or multinational if there're any left here, given loans to build a house just as good as theirs where they say I can, driving a company car, marrying some girl presentable enough by their standards for their annual dinner, producing kids I can afford to send to some private school that takes kids like ours—why? Why is it decided that that's for me? Who decided it? What's wrong with me? Why me? Is there some birthmark or something that says this is what I must be?—
Her shoulders were hunched in distress but I didn't stop. After so long, I couldn't stop.—It's like a curse, I'm supposed to take it as my fate. And now you, you, when I can act like the rest of you, when I can face them in court and tell them they're liars, liars, those thugs who've been let into our house—and I let them in, I'm the one who's let every kind of destruction into our house, I'm always there, handy, Will is going to do it,
well-named, he'll do it—now you say, It's enough. Enough! There's nothing for me in the struggle to change our lives. I'm needed at home. I
am
home. It's
enough
! I've had enough of it!—
She was flinching as if I were hitting her; I was hitting her and I stopped only for breath.
—I can't do it. Then you must do it some other way. Not through me. I can't part with you, Will.—
—What's so special about me? So I'm your stake in something, I'm to be something you and he don't really want to give up? Not even for the revolution? The token place in the boardroom you don't really, somewhere in you—you don't want to destroy? Am I your hostage, your middle-class nostalgia for nice things? You don't really want to see your flowered curtains used for a better purpose than dolling up the bedroom in the house meant for a white man.—
We walked on in terrible silence for a while. My heart was thudding with the excitement of my cruelty.
—I don't think it's like that. It won't be like that.—
I gave a snort of rejection,
There was no way out for her, even though she hadn't said as much. She had no way to stop me speaking the truth for myself. We walked quietly down the street where we lived. From some way off we could see something hanging on our gate; in the dusk it looked like a black sweater, perhaps it had been found in the street and displayed there for its owner to reclaim. It was a dead cat, and tied to its strangled neck was a piece of cardboard lettered in red: BLACK COMMUNIST BITCH GET OUT OF HERE. Aila was fumbling desperately to untie the cat. I said, It's dead, Ma, it's no good, it's dead. Leave it. Let's go inside. I'll see to it afterwards.
Somehow our arms went out around each other. Close, we
walked calmly up the cement path and shut the front door behind us. That was all anyone watching the house would have the satisfaction of seeing.
From where did Aila's obstinacy come? Obduracy, rather. That was not in her nature, either; before.
Sonny had to define to himself what he meant by ‘before'. Yes, there was a blank in his chronology of her life; he knew little of the changes in her for which, he believed, he was responsible. He had noticed she'd cut her hair, that's about all—women's whims. Meant little to him at the time.
He tried to keep calm and confine himself to reason; he submitted himself to self-criticism as an intelligent man, who had freed his mind through the struggle, should. There must be method. He knew he was having difficulty in accepting Aila as a comrade. He had consciously to rid himself of an outworn perception of Aila. Consciously; that was the problem.
Perhaps if (as he had read, long ago, Jesuit educationists said) character is formed, for life, in the first three years of human existence, the idea of the loved partner remains fixed,
arrested at the first few naive years of a relationship. Reason told him that if he could accept Aila as a comrade like any other, as well as his wife, they might revive and deepen the old Sonny/Aila life together. It would be their life, even if she were to be imprisoned, and he might be, once again, at some time. He knew that to bring this about there were certain requirements. Aila had to be reinstated as his wife. He had done this. He also knew that it was necessary to forgive himself as well as be forgiven by Aila—guilt is self-indulgent and unproductive.
Sonny forgave himself; but this was futile. Aila had never reproached him, so there was nothing for her to forgive. And nothing in her behaviour recognized that anyone but she herself was responsible for it. Even the harm he had done her was no claim on her; he saw that. Perhaps he flattered himself Aila had needed to suffer his love of another woman to change. Perhaps it had nothing to do with that, with him. Perhaps she had freed herself just as he had, through the political struggle. He would never be able to ask her; the question of his woman was irrelevant, now.
The lawyers tacitly understood it was no use depending on Sonny to influence Aila. Consultations, at which he sat in, were becoming more and more difficult. The Defence asked for and was granted an extension of the remand for preparation of fresh evidence. It was to Sonny the Senior Counsel came privately, as a doctor informs a relative, not the patient, of a terminal diagnosis, to say that he was withdrawing from the case. Sonny implored him to reconsider; Aila, when told, merely nodded quietly and cleared her throat, gave no indication of wanting to change the man's decision. Although the advocate had lost patience with her angrily at their last meetings, she thanked
him ‘for all he had done' and—strange for Aila!—when he shook her hand, suddenly kissed his cheek.
 
 
Tuesday the fourteenth of June.
That was the afternoon when I came home and my father was alone. He was standing about at the telephone as if he had just used it or was expecting it to ring. Five o'clock, the time when they went for the second report to the police station every day; one of the routines that order our kind of life. I was so drilled and disciplined to it that I even felt anxious they were going to be late.—You haven't been yet?—
—No.—He stood there.
—Has she gone on her own?—
—I haven't seen her.—
—Did she have to go to town?—‘Town' meant the lawyers' chambers.
—I phoned. She's not there.—
—Oh I suppose she'll come in any minute.—
It was his hands that alarmed me.—The car's in the garage.—
I noticed his hands; the thumbs rubbing against the inner surface of the fingers in the unconscious trembling motion of those old men whose nervous system is deteriorating.
—She must've gone out with someone, then. Weren't you here?—
—Ben gave me a lift—there was a meeting, so I left the car for her. He brought me back an hour ago.—
—There must be a note. I'll look in the kitchen.—
—I've looked.—
We waited for her. The winter cold coming up from the floor and the darkening of the windows to glassy black splintered by
streetlights marked the passing of time although he and I avoided being caught, each by the other, looking at a watch. So long as the length of time that had passed was not measured we could believe she would come in soon.—Shouldn't you phone the police station and make some excuse, she's sick or something?—
He looked at me as if what I had just said had the effect of making him recognize what he was avoiding. He held a deep breath.—That's the last thing we ought to do.—
—I can't see why not. They'll withdraw bail if she doesn't report, won't they? We can get a note from Jasood, she was ill.—
—An excuse …it's a sign. It alerts them.—
—To what?—
Father-knows-best. Late, late at night, late in our lives and she's not coming back, he somehow knows she's not coming back—what right does he think he has to keep something from me?
I wanted to yell at him to keep his hands still.
—You know what's happened to her. Where is she? Tell me.—
—I don't know, Will, I'm telling you, I don't know where she is. I just don't know.—
Ah yes. The less you know, the better; that's the way we protect one another, I ought to know that, I'd know that if I were one of them. He was telling me the truth.
We went to bed, he and I. He left the door of their bedroom open and so did I mine, I don't know what for. We lay apart in the dark following imaginary passages of Aila through the night, placing her where she might be—both of us, I'm sure. I fell asleep towards dawn because I'm young but I don't suppose he slept at all.
A young girl came early in the morning. She had purplepink painted lips and nails and she wore white plastic boots, a
smart little garment-factory girl on her way to work. Any neighbourly informers watching the house would have thought her one of the girl-friends of the son, she looked exactly the kind of girl they believe the son of our kind of people would be attracted to. Her long nails and her bangles clicked as she scrabbled for the note in her bag and gave it to my father. In the midst of the strain and tension of those moments there was an incongruous aside, in my feelings; pride in the fact of the unguessed-at commitment of our people to the struggle, hidden under this cheap appearance. Whites don't know what they're seeing when they look at us; at her, at the black women from the country knitting jerseys for sale on the city pavements, at the black combi drivers taking over the streets, the miners in their NUM T-shirts; at my sister, Baby, at Aila, my mother. I want to tell them.
The note was from one of my father's comrades in the leadership. It asked him to come to a certain house. I stayed behind to be home when the police came to look for her. Of course; I was the one who opened the door to them. But she wasn't there. Another time, my mother had gone away and never come back. Now Aila is gone, and she won't come back until everything here is changed, there is air, she will not be judged by the laws white men made for us, she will not live across the veld in a ghetto or be an illegal tenant in a white man's street like this one, where the white neighbours have come out to watch—the women with their arms crossed over their breasts, lips drawn back in salacious expectation, the frowning men with their hands dangling—a police van standing at the gate of this house and the police with their guns and dogs on the stoep.
 
 
The leadership thought it best not to involve Sonny in the decision that Aila should estreat bail and leave the country.
There was the chance that once her disappearance was discovered he would be detained again, to be questioned about her. This way, at least he could not be proved to have facilitated his wife's escape.
So she did not need him, even for that.
He told his son it was leadership's decision she should go because the case against her was very serious and in the course of evidence important information about the movement might be revealed. There were infiltrators to the movement involved, who would turn State witnesses under indemnity. Aila had performed her missions commendably, but now her cover was blown. Her name would be honoured, from now on, in the movement inside and outside the country—where she could still be active. Dr Jasood regarded the loss of his money as a contribution to the struggle. When Sonny went with his son Will to thank Aila's old employer, he continued to write some report on a patient while he spoke.—She is worth more than ten thousand rands to us. God bless her.—
There was news of Aila after a while. It came through a third or fourth person, probably someone like she had been, who appeared to be moving innocently between countries. Sonny applied for a passport so that he might have a chance to visit her sometime; see Baby, and his grandchild. But the passport was refused, not unexpectedly, although one of his comrades remarked—Can't see why he shouldn't have a good chance of getting one, now.—
The comment stayed with him long after he was resigned to the disappointment over the passport. It was the echo of common acceptance that the keepers of police files would find he no longer counted as particularly representative of the danger of the movement, to them. It is the enemy—the police, the Ministers of Law and Order and Justice—who decides who the
leaders of the people are; it is the measure of the attention, the hounding and harassment you receive, that makes you ‘Sonny'. Under the States of Emergency in the country the public gatherings at which his speeches had been so successful were banned. The press, fearful of prosecution and shut-down, took a chance on reporting only the words of leaders so prominent, so well known in the outside world that the government hesitated to act when these leaders defied the law. Sonny a backroom boy, useful for writing statements that appeared or were spoken under the names of the venerable, or for tidying up the vocabulary of the rising stars to give them more weight. Again, as he had done once before, in a moment when old comradeship, the special intimacy of the clandestine life, made it seem possible, he embarrassed others with the direct: Aren't I trusted any more? And there were such denials, such protests—what was he thinking of? What had got into his head?
But were they not thinking—had they not thought, what had got into his head, into his life, deflected him from purpose, the only purpose that mattered at the time when they couldn't do without him—what had got into his head was preoccupation with a woman. There is no place for a second obsession in the life of a revolutionary. But he had never neglected the cause, for her! She was enfolded, one with it, she had connected his manhood, his sexual power as a man, with it! She had given commitment the pumping of the heart. He was overcome with distress at this denial of her (in himself); at this injustice to himself.
And then again—in his depression, the absence of Sonny/ Aila, his feelings somersaulted violently; he found himself thinking—insanely—that if the law had still forbidden him Hannah, if that Nazi law for the ‘purity' of the white race that disgustingly conceived it had still been in force, he would never have risked
himself. For Hannah. Could not have. Because needing Hannah, taking the risk of going to prison for that white woman would have put at risk his only freedom, the only freedom of his kind, the freedom to go to prison again and again, if need be, for the struggle. Only for the struggle. Nothing else was worthwhile, recognized, nothing. That filthy law would have saved him.
Out of the shot and danger of desire
And then he feared himself, come to such perverse conjecture. If it should somehow show in his face, if anyone should somehow sense the shame of it passing through his mind, one of their interrogators jeering in glee, one of his comrades: staring, appalled.
He turned fifty-two. The day was not remarked in any way. His son did not remember the birthday but, a few days after, a card came. Pasted on it was the photograph of a laughing small child in a cap with Mickey Mouse ears. Loving wishes (the formula of the card), and hand-written X-ed kisses, signatures—Baby, Aila, the husband he had never met.
A tide wearing away a coastline, little by little, falling into the ocean of time. They fall away, one by one, lovers, the clinging arms of children, the memory of when life was unthinkable without them. Fifty-two. And all the while he was triumphant in his vitality and virility, apparently unaffected by his forty-something years, this decay was taking place … His gums (the dentist insisted it was a long-term process) were already shrinking, his prostate (Jasood said he might have to operate) was becoming enlarged. Close to the earth and happy for battle as he had felt himself, age was there, working within him.
Yet what had been the political ideal now became realized in his daily life under circumstances never sought. Living with his son in a house emptied of its life—two silent men, unable
to sustain it—he was stripped of every obligation, every preoccupation, left for the cause alone. And unfettered, even, by any ambition, from the seduction of being the crowds' ‘Sonny', which perhaps at one time muddied the clear commitment that had evolved in the schoolmaster, he continued to work for the cause now, all his days and half the nights whenever he was needed. He lived like so many others of his kind whose families are fragmented in the diaspora of exile, code names, underground activity, people for whom a real home and attachments are something for others who will come after.

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