None to Accompany Me

by Nadine Gordimer

  All this process was perfectly logical, Mrs Stark would remind her colleagues; we have to come to terms with the fact that in the Foundation we are not dealing with the only real means to defend these people, which is to defeat the power that creates and puts the idea into practice—we are not tackling that at all, at all, let’s not kid ourselves—we are only grappling with its logical consequences, looking for the legal loopholes that will delay or frustrate or—occasionally—win out over that logic. They would smile in appreciation of her hard-headed sense of proportion, quite difficult to keep when confronted with the sort of trusting wretchedness facing them in supplicants every day.

  Now that the Act that put the Idea into practice has been abolished by the beginning of political defeat of that power, the Foundation has not, as might be expected, become redundant. Mrs Stark was not entirely right—or rather she and her colleagues, absorbed in pragmatic strategies while the Act was in force, had no time to think how far beyond its old promulgation and logical enactment, beyond its abolition, its consequences would become yet new consequences. Now communities whose removal the Foundation had been unsuccessful in stalling are coming to present the case for having restored to them the village, the land, their place, which was taken from them and allotted to whites. The same old men in stained worn suits, taking off hats in hands that seem to be uprooted from earth, sit on the other side of the interviewer’s desk. There is the same patient alertness needed to listen to the tale and, while it is being told, assess where, out of desperation and guile, it is omitting something the emissary thinks might prejudice his case, where it is being exaggerated for sympathy, and where the facts and their truthful interpretation are the strength of the case, something to work on.

  Although Mrs Stark is the one who prepares the yearly report for publication—it has to be both comprehensive and persuasive, because it goes out to existing and prospective donors—and she sometimes travels abroad as a fund-raiser, she does her share of interviewing and investigation. Nobody can con Mrs Stark, no. To some she seems forbidding—and what white person, who among all those whites who still have to be approached and convinced before you, a black, can come into what you are now told is your own, is not forbidding, still there, on the other side of the desk, just as before? But although with her discouraging coldness she doesn’t patronize these applicants struggling to express themselves in English—the language of the other side of the desks—and although she doesn’t try to ingratiate herself chummily, as many whites feel obliged to do, with the blacks among her colleagues, she has—how to categorize this?—connections with some of these colleagues that have come about rather than been sought and even, over the years, with individuals who to others would be scarcely distinguishable from any in the endless trudge of dispossessed in and out of the Foundation’s premises. The young clerk named Oupa will saunter into her office eating from his lunch packet of chips or takeaway of curried chicken, and sit there, sometimes in easy silence while she reads through notes she’s taken in an interview just concluded, a silence sometimes broken by talk between her bites at an apple and sips of yoghurt. He’s studying at night for a law degree by correspondence and started off by coming to ask her for an explanation of something he didn’t grasp; it was her very reserve itself that in his naivety made him think she would be better qualified to give him the right answers than any of the other lawyers on the premises. She was the figure of the schoolmistress missing in his lonely self-education, she was the abstract image of authority that, resented all your life or not, you had to turn to in your powerlessness. Then he began to talk to her about his four years on Robben Island, seventeen to twenty-one. It was everyone’s prison story, of his kind and generation, but he found himself telling it differently to this white woman, not censored or touched up as he was drawn out to tell it to other whites eager for vicarious experience. He broke off and returned to it on other days, remembering things he had forgotten or not wanted to remember; not only the brutality and heedless insult of walls and warders, but also the distortions in his own behaviour he now looked back on. Sometimes with disbelief, talking to her, sometimes with puzzlement, even shame. There was the comradeship, the real meaning of brother (as he put it). —But you suddenly hate someone, you can hardly keep your hands off his throat—and it’s over nothing, a piece of string to tie your shoe, one time a fight in the shower about whose turn it was! And the same two people, when we were on hunger strike, we’d do anything for each other … I can’t think it was me.—

  What did she say? He was a gentle person forced, too young, to see another version of himself that it needed only violence against him, degradation in suffering the lack of humanity in others, to bring to life. She didn’t console, didn’t assure him that that individual, that self, no longer existed. —It was you.—

  He reached for a tissue from the box on her desk with a gloomy tilt of the head and the answering tilt of her head said it was not necessary to ask. He was wiping chicken-wing-greasy fingers. She passed him the waste-paper bin, dropping her apple core into it on the way.

  Oupa doubled as driver of the Foundation’s station-wagon battered by the lawyers’ trips into the backveld to consult with communities under threat of removal. One day when Mrs Stark’s car had been stolen he gave her a lift home, and the theft revived something else. Before he went to the Island, he was awaiting trial on the mainland in a cell with criminals. —Murderers, man! Gangsters. I can tell you, they were brilliant. Nothing to touch them for brains. The things they’d brought off—robberies, bank hold-ups. And they’d play the whole show through for us. Exactly how they did it. Prison means nothing to them, they had the warders bribed and scared of them. Even whites. They had all their stuff waiting for them outside, for when they’d done their time. I tell you, those guys would make top-class lawyers and big businessmen.— He grinned, chin lifted as he drove.

  Again Mrs Stark was comfortably silent, if she noted, she made no remark on what he had just innocently confirmed: something of the unacknowledged self that came into being in prison still existed within him, a pride in and defiant community with anyone, everyone, who had the daring to defy the power of white men, to take from them what was not theirs, whether by political rebellion or by the gangster’s gun; silent because this was a self that, by nature of what she was, could not exist among her selves.

  —You ever come across any of them again, outside?—

  Oupa pressed his elbows to his ribs and brought his shoulders up to his ears. —Those people! Man! Je-ss-uss! I’d be terrified.—

  Chapter 2

  Vera left her promising position in a prosperous legal firm after, when she had failed to conceive for twelve years, her second child was born, Annick.

  She has never known whether her first child, Ivan, is the son of her divorced husband or of Bennet Stark, her love of whom was ringed indelibly on a photograph. No one else will ever know that she herself does not. He of the sun-grained, fair-skinned nape is now living in Australia, retired from something to do with shipping, and has nothing around him to bring to the surface that last visit he made to the house they had once shared; and if, in the mood of male camaraderie on a drinking evening there is an exchange of confidences about the unpredictable sexual behaviour of women, he contributes the example of an ex-wife who gave him a better hour than she’d ever done during the brief marriage, he is unlikely to think there could have been any consequences—she was accustomed to see to that. Perhaps he might feel a momentary stab of betrayal, despite her complete betrayal of him, at mentioning her more or less in the context of the one-night stand, but it was all so long ago … As for her present husband, it’s unthinkable that ever there could be betweenthem one of those terrible, embattled stages of marriage when she might thrust her hand down into their life to seize a weapon to wound him mortally.

  Ben was almost embarrassedly dismissive of the fact that his daughter had inherited his beauty; part of the quality of that beauty was that he was not aware of it, h
e was brought to see it only by remarks upon the beauty of the baby girl as the image of her father. Ivan—because he reproduced the face of his mother?—remained Ben’s favoured child.

  When the girl was born, with the marvellous markings of her father’s black hair and double fringe of lashes, even the bevel-edged lips, Vera could have been looking in a mirror where her lover from the mountains was preserved as he was as a child. A tremendous gratitude gushed from her along with the expulsion of the afterbirth. For a year she stayed at home taking care of the baby with the tender emotional fervour of one making amends—for what, to whom, was diffused in maternal energy; from which she looked up, only now and then, at the newspaper headlines announcing arrests, trials, bans, finally the outlawing of political movements. Physical fulfilment is a temporary withdrawal from the world, a sealing-off from threat and demand, whether directed to oneself or others. At the time, it seems the other world, all extraneous, is jabber and distraction, a crowded station passed through, train blinds drawn and compartment door locked. The self-absorption was pierced only by the fact of the baby shot dead on its mother’s back at Sharpeville—an infant like her own, like Bennet’s. Her life was all touch: during the day the smooth plumpness of her small daughter damply warm against her hip, the hands of her leggy son, roughened and scratched in tussles at play; the caresses of love-making. There could have been a biological explanation for the strong resurgence of eroticism between Bennet and her. Some theory that after giving birth women experience fresh sexual initiatives and responses. They had been married for twelve years; whatever the reason, the feast of sex begun as a picnic in the mountains again preoccupied her and her lover-husband as it had done. Intelligent people as they were, while they discussed what was happening around them he could be distracted by the bare cup of her armpit showing in a sleeveless dress, and she could be conscious of the curve of his genitals enticing under his jeans.

  Bennet Stark carved wood and modelled clay but while recognition for his work in this vocation seemed long in coming had had to make use of a conventional degree he had earned when too young to know what he wanted to do. Bennet Stark was known, behind his back at the Department of English in the university where he worked, as Our Male Lead; as if he were responsible for his looks and the mixture of resentment and admiration these aroused. From the point of view of advancement in an academic community it’s a bad sign to have some advantage that is simply a gift of nature, not earned and not attainable for others by any amount of hard work, lobbying or toadying. He remained in a junior position and the ambitions the lovers had for him as an artist when first they exchanged confidences beside a mountain stream were in abeyance while they concentrated on each other and the extension of themselves in their children. He still modelled in clay occasionally over a weekend—the heads of the children, which were growing, changing, even as the clay hardened the image of one stage or another, and the naked torso of Vera, anonymous female body to anyone other than himself, who supplied the beloved head in his mind. But married to the woman he had captivated and captured and the father of a family, he had given up the idea of becoming a sculptor. Vera, at least, had attained her easier ambition of qualifying in law. Lovingly, he felt no jealousy; hers was a practical goal, not dependent on the imponderable mystery of talent, of which, protected by sensual happiness, he came to accept he perhaps did not have enough.

  When Annick began to wriggle out of her arms and Ivan distanced himself from the need of her touch on childish wounds, Vera appeared restlessly displaced. She told Bennet she was going back to work.

  They could certainly do with the money.

  —I’m not going back to the firm.—

  He did not know what to make of a sudden announcement that overturned all assumptions.

  —I don’t want to fight their insurance claims when they lose their jewellery and Mercedes. Or dig the dirt in their divorces.— He looked at her tenderly, patiently. —Set up on your own?—

  —I don’t know.—

  Vera read newspapers and reports, White Papers, was drawn to people who were spread-eagled between their private attachments and those other tentacles, the tug of others’ predicaments, the tangle of frustration and misery; women, as she was a woman, lifted out of the humble ramshackle of their lives and dropped, destitute, in the veld, men, as hers was a man, endorsed out of a town where they might find work, driven off farms where their fathers had given their labour; children unlike hers because there was no childhood for them, begging and sniffing glue for comfort in the street. She did come to know. She went to work at the Foundation, not out of the white guilt people talked about, but out of a need to take up, to balance on her own two feet the time and place to which, by birth, she understood she had no choice but to belong. This need must have been growing unheeded—seed shat by a bird and germinating, sprouting, beside a cultivated tree—climbing the branches of passionate domesticity.

  Population removals were being fought everywhere to the limit of the Foundation’s resources; she was working until midnight at home as well as all day at the offices; Bennet had left the university and, with a partner, opened a market consultancy in the city. Alone in the house in bed at night, they talked over for hours the disappointments, worries, resentments and compensations each had gathered during the day, giving one another advice, putting together the context, from his experience of one level of society and her experience of another, their life.

  Mr Tertius Odendaal had three farms, one inherited from his grandfather through his father, one that came as his wife’s dowry, and one that he had bought in the agricultural boom times of the early Eighties. With America and the British—even the Germans who had once been supporters of the war in which his grandfather was a Boer general—interfering in the affairs of the country, embargoing oil supplies, boycotting sports tours, encouraging the blacks to make trouble so that even his ignorant farm boys were no longer reliable, he began to think about looking to the present, if not the future. With the old stern President pushed out by one of his cabinet who smiled like a film star and was said to be having talks with blacks, no one could be sure what that would be. Not twenty kilometres across the veld from his homestead there was a black homeland. He had had to put an electrified fence round his kraal to protect his Holsteins from thieves, after one of his watch-boys had been slashed in a panga attack. Even the old President had dumped blacks too near white farms. On one of his other farms—the one bought when there were good rains for his maize crop and beef prices were high—that he used only for seasonal grazing, he found squatters, although the herd-boy who had his women and umpteen children with him in his outpost of mud and thatch huts lied that these were just his family, visiting. He told the herd-boy to clear out, get off the farm and take his hangers-on with him. But next time he drove to inspect the place with one of his other boys there were fluttering sheets of plastic and leantos of cardboard, tin roofs held down by stones and old tyres, thrown up on his veld like worm-casts. Only women and children to be seen; the men would have been away at work or loafing somewhere, even as far as town. He got his boy to warn these people with an harangue in their own language: what were they doing there, they must pack up their rubbish and get off his land immediately, if they were not gone by tomorrow he’d bring the police. A tiny child clutched his penis in fear and drew up his cheeks to whimper. The women stood unblinking or turned away. As the farmer’s bakkie lurched and swayed off, one screamed something the herd-boy didn’t translate to the farmer. The cry trailed in the wake of the vehicle.

  Mr Odendaal decided to move with the times; whatever they might be. What the Government had done, was doing, could not be undone by one Afrikaner alone. Fighting its betrayal of the white farmer was something for which political action would be found. In the meantime, farmers would have to—in the businessmen’s way of speaking—’diversify resources’, yes, that’s it, get up to the tricks that make those people rich. He applied to the Provincial Administration for permission to estab
lish a black township on one of his holdings. He would convert the farm into cash as a landlord; he would divide it into plots for rent to blacks. He was going to turn their invasion to profit.

  During the year pending the Administration’s decision—the application appeared in the Government Gazette and there were ponderous objections from farmers in the vicinity—1,500 squatter families representing approximately 26,000 people took possession of Portion 19. These figures for the Odensville squatter camp (it must have got out among the squatters that Odendaal had thought to commemorate the family name in his township) were ascertained by a field-worker of the Legal Foundation, to which a man who presented himself as the spokesperson of the squatters had appealed for investigation. A station-wagon with a tide-mark of dust and a windscreen dashed with splattered insects drew up at the Odendaal farmstead. Odendaal sensed at once it had been through the squatter camp that had been meant to be his township. A woman with white-streaked hair cut like a man’s, speaking the usual badly accented Afrikaans of English-speaking townspeople, introduced herself there on the stoep as a Mrs Stack or Stock from the Legal Foundation.

  At the pronouncement of that title his body shifted in reflex to bar the front door; that body would not let her past into his house. She actually had with her the man he had refused to meet, whose existence was a matter for the police to deal with —the black bastard who put up that crowd of criminals, drunkards, and won’t-works on his land to talk about ‘rights’ they never would have had the nerve to think of. She introduced the man and even the driver, also a black, as if she expected that the two blacks would be received as part of her delegation and greeted as visitors.