My Son's Story (8 page)

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Authors: Nadine Gordimer

BOOK: My Son's Story
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—But you're talking about her as if she's dead!—Hannah was distressed, strangely laughing.—Sonny, she's alive. It's not ‘was'! She is, she is!—
What would I do if I did not have you, Sonny said to Hannah when he was safe, still inside her after love-making—she liked to keep him there, held by her broad thighs that trembled when she walked naked about the room. And tranquilly, because it was all one, in them, they turned from caresses to worried discussion about the action of police
agents provocateurs
among church groups in the rent boycotts.
There was Will. What would he have done if there hadn't been Will. Only to Will could he find some way of indicating where he could be found if something happened. Like the Security Police, Will would be in on it; Will already was in on the mystery of his absences. Will could not evade being drawn further in.
Sonny had no choice.
Needing
Hannah.
 
 
I went on the motorbike. I had it by then. They gave it to me for my birthday. He said to me with that smile of a loving parent concealing a fine surprise, you can get a licence at sixteen now, can't you. So I knew he was going to buy me a bike. I never asked for it but they gave it to me. With the latest, most expensive helmet for my safety; he must have had to promise my mother that.
I went with the helmet and chin-guard and goggles hiding my face. You can't see the place from the street, where he goes. Dogs at the gate, and a black gardener had to come to let me in; I suppose they wag their tails for someone who comes often, is well known to them by his own scent. There was a big house but that's not where he goes. She lives in a cottage behind trees
at the end of the garden. Maybe there's even a private entrance from there I didn't know about, he didn't like to tell me. All open and above-board through the front entrance.
He must have told her, she was expecting me. Oh it's Will, isn't it—as if the helmet and stuff prevented her from recognizing me, from remembering the cinema that time. It also playfully implied, determined to be friendly, that I was rude, not taking the helmet off. So I did. So she could see it was me, Will, yes. I gave her whatever it was he'd sent me with. It was a package, books or something, he told me ‘Miss Plowman' needed urgently.—You're the family Mercury now, with that wonderful machine of yours—off you go, son, but don't tear along like a Hell's Angel, hey.—A perfect performance in front of my mother.
This was where he came. It must be familiar as our house to him, where we live now and where we lived when we were in Benoni, because our house is where we are, our furniture, our things, his complete Shakespeare, the smells of my mother's cooking and the flowers she puts on the table. But this isn't like a house at all; well, all right, a cottage, but not even any kind of place where you'd expect a white would live. The screen door full of holes. Bare floor and a huge picture like spilt paint that dazzles your eyes, a word-processor, hi-fi going with organ music, twisted stubs in ashtrays, fruit, packets of bran and wheat-germ, crumpled strings of women's underthings drying on a radiator—and a bed, on the floor. There was the bed, just a very big wide mattress on the floor, covered with some cloth with embroidered elephants and flowers and bits of mirror in the design—the bed, just like that, right there in the room where anybody can walk in, the room where I was standing with my helmet in my hand.
So now I know.
Who is Hannah Plowman?
Not only his father's blonde. Not the woman cast by the adolescent son as an excuse for sulky defensiveness, disdain—and jealousy. Not the fancy-woman fellow-traveller of a coloured with a subversive record, known to the Security Police. The dossier of an individual's conscious origins is really all that is sure, and it goes back only so far as the individual's own living memory. Hers begins with her maternal grandfather, and she knew, at least, that she was named for his Quaker mother although he was an Anglican—a missionary in one of the British Protectorates on the borders of the country. After some minor members of British royalty had come to see the Union Jack lowered and the flag of independence raised, the missionary stayed on in his retirement among the old black
baputi
1
whose souls he was convinced he had saved and whose language had become the one he most used. He did a little translating of
religious works for the local Sunday schools and he reminisced with old Chiefs. His brother had gone to South Africa and become chairman of a finance corporation, with directorships in mining, maize products and the packaging industry. The brother paid for Hannah's education in England when she outgrew the village mission school she attended with the local black children; for her mother had studied nursing in what was then Rhodesia, and come back to the mission pregnant with what turned out to be a girl child. Hannah was told her father had been a soldier, and since she knew soldiers got killed in wars, presumed he was dead. Later she found out he was a Bulawayo policeman who already had a wife. Hannah's mother married a Jewish doctor she met when she was theatre sister at the mission hospital taken over by the independent government, and went to live in Cape Town. Until her mother emigrated with him to Australia, Hannah spent part of her school holidays in the grandfather's mud-brick and thatch house at the mission, and part in the Cape Town suburb among her step-father's collection of modern paintings.
An individual life, Hannah's, but one that has followed the shifts in power of the communities into which she was born. So that what she really is, is a matter of ‘at that time' and ‘then'; qualifications and uncertainties. Her step-father would have paid to send her to the Michaelis School of Art, since she showed such intelligent ignorance when studying his pictures, but she hankered after her late-afternoon wanderings in the mission village that had become the outskirts of a town, talking with the young men she had always known, now wearing T-shirts distributed by the brewery, the girls she had played with, now coming back from shift as cleaners at the Holiday Inn. And when she was with her grandfather and he suggested she would be happy qualifying to teach at what had been her old school,
founded by him, the idea settled over her in dismay. In Cape Town she had met young people, university students, sons and daughters of comfortable, cultivated white households like her step-father's, who were working with trade unions, legal aid bureaux, community arts programmes, human rights projects in squatter camps—while she would be teaching children just enough to fit them to bottle beer and clean the dirt rims off tourists' bath-tubs. She was not a dilettante but not socially programmed, so to speak; had to choose where to place herself more realistically than in her childish broad sense that all Southern Africa was home: there were boundaries, treaties, barbed wire, heavily-armed border posts.
South Africa is a centripetal force that draws people, in the region, not only out of economic necessity, but also out of the fascination of commitment to political struggle. The fascination came to her in the mud-brick and thatch of the mission, the dust that had reddened her Nordic hair and pink ears: from her grandfather's commitment to struggle against evil in men, for God. For her the drive was to struggle against it for man—for humans. (She was a feminist, careful of genders. But she wouldn't have thought of it as ‘evil'—too pretentious, too sanctimonious for her, though not in her grandfather.) She worked to that end in a number of organizations around South Africa. Some were banned, and she would have to move on to a similar socially-committed job elsewhere. She was married for a while to a young lawyer who became clinically depressed by the government's abrogations of the rule of law and persuaded her to emigrate; he went ahead to London but there recovered and fell in love with someone else, she never joined him. The hi-fi equipment, records and books were shipped to him. She took only the mattress from the king-size bed (because with that you could live anywhere) and a painting by a follower of Jackson
Pollock her step-father had given her when he packed up for Australia. The trusts and foundations that employed her paid very little, out of a dependency on charitable grants from abroad. Yet you cannot be called poor if you are poor by choice—if she had wanted to, she could have been set up in a boutique or public relations career by the branch of her grandfather's family who had ‘made good' not in the way he had shown her.
The nature of work she did develops high emotions. It arises from crises. It deals only with disruption, disjunction—circumstances in people's lives that cannot be met with the responses that serve for continuity. To monitor trials is to ‘monitor' the soaring and plunging graph of feelings that move men and women to act, endangering themselves; the curves and drops of bravery, loss of nerve, betrayal; cunning learnt by courage, courage learnt by discipline—and others which exceed the competence of any graph to record, would melt its needle in the heat of intensity: the record of people who, receiving a long jail sentence, tell the court they regret nothing; of those who, offered amnesty on condition that they accept this as ‘freedom' in place of the concept for which they went to prison, choose to live out their lives there. Such inconceivable decisions are beyond the capacity of anyone who does not make one. The spirit's shouldering of the world, as Atlas's muscles took on the physical weight of the world. Such people cannot be monitored. But knowing them and their families, who have this abnormal—Hannah, speaking of it once with Sonny, corrects herself—no, not abnormal, can't use that word for it—that divine strength expands the emotional resources of an ordinary individual (like Hannah) even in grasping that it
does exist
.
Association with prisoners of conscience is a special climate in which this heightening infloresces. Listening in courts while the sacrifice of their individual lives for man against evil slowly
is distorted by the law in volumes of recorded words, police videos, in the mouths of State witnesses, into an indictment for having committed evil; touching the hands of the accused across the barrier while they joke about their jailers; visiting the wives, husbands, parents, children, the partners in many kinds of alliances broken by imprisonment—all this extended Hannah's feelings in a way she would not have known possible for anyone. In love. She was in love. Not as the term is understood, as she had been in love, at twenty-three, with her lawyer, and they had ceased to love.
In
love, a temperature and atmospheric pressure of shared tension, response, the glancing contact of trust in place of caresses, and the important, proud responsibility of doing anything asked, even the humblest tasks, in place of passionate private avowals. A loving state of being.
It was in this state that she developed the persistence, the bold lies, the lack of scruple in threatening international action to pressure prison authorities to allow her to see detainees. And it was in this state she understood her mission to visit their families.
She drove a Volkswagen Beetle through the battleground streets of Soweto to find old people who didn't know whether to trust her, she was received in the neat segregated suburbia of Bosmont and Lenasia by women who didn't know how they were going to keep up payments on the glossy furniture, she lost herself in the squatter camps where addresses didn't exist and the only routes marked in the summer muck of mud and rot were those rutted by the wheelbarrows of people fetching their supplies of beer from the liquor store on the main road. The house in the lower-class white suburb into which one of the detainees had moved his family illegally had a twirly wroughtiron gate and a plaster pelican, no doubt left behind by the white owners as the shed cast of any creature exactly reveals
itself. The wife was beautiful and correct, composed, stockings and high heels—it had the effect of making Hannah feel not intrusive but unnecessary, and talking away to cover this up. The wife kept listening sympathetically, making Hannah's confusion worse. This quiet woman apparently was accustomed to being obeyed. There was tea ordered to be brought in by a daughter in whom the mother's beauty was reproduced as pert prettiness. A schoolgirl who worked at weekends; and the wife had a good job, she politely made it perfectly clear they wanted no-one to enter the arrangements they themselves had made to manage without the father of the family. The mother, with her fine, slow smile (what perfect teeth for a middle-aged woman; Hannah's were much repaired at only thirty) put a hand on the shoulder of an overgrown-looking boy who had kept Hannah standing a moment, in suspicion, before letting her in.—My son's the man of the house now.—
A house that smelled of stale spiced cooking. On the wall a travelling salesman's Kahlil Gibran texts. But in the glass-fronted bookcase a surprising little library, not only the imitation-leather-bound mail-order classics usually to be found as a sign of hunger for knowledge, and not only the Marx, Lenin, Fanon, Gandhi and Nkrumah, Mandela and Biko always to be found as a sign of political self-education, but Kafka and D. H. Lawrence, she noticed in glimpses aside, while talking, talking, talking like that.
She had been there once again. But that was after. It was when the house was invaded by laughter and music, all that it had been the first time thrust aside, as the furniture was for dancing. The loving state of being in which she had sat with the beautiful wife, the daughter, the son, was also thrust away, terrifyingly transformed into something else: passionate awareness of the ex-prisoner host. The first time he and she made
love she had felt a strange threat of loss in the midst of joy, and had tried to explain it to herself by attempting to put it, in another way, to him. He didn't really understand; but sexual love has the matchless advantage of the flesh as reassurance for anything, everything, for the moment. The body speaks and all is silenced.
So everything in that house she remembered from that first day was cherished because it was part of him. It was all she had of that part of him she could not really know, which she had transformed into a lover. It was what both he and she discounted between them, in her room.
She would have liked to be the older confidante of the girl (looked as if she needed someone) and the adult-who-is-not-a-parent, so useful to an adolescent, in the life of the boy, his son. Even the pseudo-philosophy of the cheap framed texts became tender evidence of the qualities of the man who had left behind him fake consolations of uplift taken by the powerless and poor. She put away for safe-keeping her first day's vision of his house like a lock of hair from the head of the child that has become the man.
 
 
It's part of the commonplace strategy of adultery to appear in company where both wife and mistress are present. It's accepted as merely a way of hiding, by displaying there's nothing to hide. But Sonny was so inexperienced, he did not know how to suppress, in himself, the real urge discovered to underlie such confrontations. He learned they were not brought about by any social inevitability it would look suspicious to avoid; they were not arranged to reassure and protect Aila or to ensure that if he and Hannah were by chance to be seen in public together it would appear an innocent encounter within a mutual political
circle. Giving his view on how to get the boycotting youth back into school without compromising their political clout, he had the attention of a lawyer and two educationists, comrades on the National Education Crisis Committee, when somewhere behind him he heard mingled in group conversation the two voices he knew best in the world. Two birds singing in his emotion: he did not hear the chatter of the other women, the cheeping of sparrows. He became eloquent, his nostrils round with conviction, he had never expressed himself more forcefully than while, the first time, instead of keeping the two women fastidiously apart within him, he possessed both at once. The exaltation was the reverse of his fear of Aila finding out.
Later, alone, desolated, shamed, he understood. He sought, even contrived, ways of appearing with his wife in houses where his other woman would be a guest.
The sexual excitement of bringing the two women together entered him as a tincture, curling cloudy in a glass of water.
 
 
She reminds me of pig. Our ancestors didn't eat pig.
A few bright hairs look like filaments of glass embedded in the pink flesh round her mouth.
I have terrible thoughts. About her. About my father with her. I imagine them …could I ever think of my mother like that! I'm sick with myself. What he's made me think about.
What'd he send me there for? I keep going over the place. What I saw, what he made me see. Her pants and bras on the radiator. The bed, right there where you walk in. Don't they know about privacy? People like her, so dedicated to our freedom, worming their way to get to see our prisoners, standing on our doorsteps. I should never have let her pass. Stupid kid
that I was. The man of the house. They bring you up to be polite and then put you in situations they didn't tell you could ever happen.

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