None to Accompany Me

by Nadine Gordimer

  She ignored that the farmer did not respond. Mr Odendaal this, Mr Odendaal that. Polite and talked so you couldn’t get a word in to stop her. —We’ve come to discuss the situation down at Odensville, which must be distressing for you, don’t think the people there don’t realize this. I’m one of the Foundation’s lawyers and—we know from experience—the worst aspect of this sort of situation is when the farmer feels he’s accepting it if he should agree to talk to the other parties concerned. The Odensville people have a spokesperson, Mr Rapulana, and I can assure you that neither of us is here to deny your position (changed to English, not knowing how to put that sort of sly lawyer’s phrase in Afrikaans). We’ve come because it’s in the best interests of everyone … believe me, I’ve seen it, solutions can sometimes be reached where there has seemed no possible way out while the only communication is the threat of police action … Mr Odendaal, I hope you’re going to talk to us, Mr Rapulana and me—oh this morning or whenever it suits you—we’re going to hear each other out without prejudice to either side.—

  This was the kind of woman who produced a revulsion in him. To him, in fact was not a woman at all, as he knew women, even if she had been young he could never have believed a man would want to touch a woman like that, would never have thought there were breasts you could fondle in the marital bedroom dark, the mouth asking questions and addressing him without the respect and natural deference due to a male, yet offensively quietly, could bring the sensation of a woman’s tongue in your mouth.

  He made her wait. He was looking over her head as if she were not there. He spoke in Afrikaans, since she thought she would make herself acceptable by trying to speak his language.

  —Daar’s geen Odensville se mense nie! Odensville is my township that’s not yet declared, nobody is living in Odensville, nobody! All those people are trespassers and the only thing I’m going to tell you, lady (the term of address emphasized, and in English), I’m going to get them run off my land, I’m going to burn down their rubbish, and you can go back yourself and tell them I’m not just talking, I’m not talking at all to you, I’ve got the men to do it with me, we know how to get it done, all right, and if they want to get in the way, that’s going to be their funeral. Running to you won’t help them. There are no Odensville ‘people’, so you can forget about calling them that. They’re nothing, vuilgoed.—

  This meddling woman—lawyers, they call themselves!— stood calmly, even the twitch of something like a smile at the side of her mouth, as if waiting for a tantrum to spend itself. He began to breathe heavily at the insult.

  The black man he would never speak to—never!—looked at him unavoidably as the dark aperture of a camera aimed. This was a country black, brought up where his parents and grandparents, share-croppers and labourers, spoke the language of the farmer they worked for, and the school for blacks where he learnt to read and write taught in Afrikaans, not his black language. The man’s Afrikaans was Odendaal’s, not Mrs Stark’s pidgin.

  —Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid. We won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children.—

  The woman lawyer touched the man’s shirt-sleeve (dressed up like a gentleman, jacket over his arm). Before she led the way back to the station-wagon she paused persistently. —Mr Odendaal, I apologize for turning up without telephoning. I’ll be writing to you and probably will be able to explain the Foundation’s assessment of the situation more acceptably than I’ve been able to do now.—

  The farmer turned his back. He opened his front door and slammed it on them behind him. In the optical illusion of blotchy explosions that comes with leaving the glare of sun for a dim hallway, he, too, paused a moment. He listened to hear the station-wagon leave his property. As if he had just stopped running, his leaping, bursting heart slowly decelerated to its normal pace.

  For a long time—how many years?—Vera still told her husband everything. Or thought she did.

  Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid. We won’t harm you.

  This reaction, response, whatever you like to call it, lay between her husband and her like a gift. Of what, to whom, their faces showed neither could decide. Back in the blueish domes where his black eyes always stirred in her the strange attention they had attracted against the thudding of a waterfall she and he had climbed to at the beginning, she looked for his answer. Once he had been the answer to everything; that was falling in love: the end of questions. But she was finding an answer within herself. The gift of the squatter leader’s tolerance, forgiveness—whichever it was—was something the farmer didn’t deserve.

  And it was unclaimed! Rejected. —Don’t you see, he isn’t able to be aware of it.— A further explanation, coming from one whose familiar symmetry of features juxtaposed the harmony of life with the discord she had not only witnessed, but been part of in this experience and was part of routinely in many others. How could these contradictions exist in one species, the human one? How could such beauty be achieved in the composition of this man’s, her chosen one’s, face, and such ugliness distort the ability of human response in that man’s, the farmer’s, spirit?

  —Who’s the fellow, anyway—from Odensville—d’you know anything about him?—

  She opened and shut a hand in the gesture of her limitations. —About as much as I do about all the others who come to us. Only difference, he’s apparently the one all the squatters trust to represent them. In many of these places there’s so much rivalry, different factions saying theirs is the man. Often we find the person we’re working with isn’t accepted by this group or that. Little power struggles going on even among people you’d think too desperately busy trying to survive, to have the energy … He seems well-educated, not like most rural schoolmasters. But I don’t know if we’re going to get anywhere with this case. If the Administration does give the farmer permission to declare a township there, he’ll be in a position to say to the people, pay up or get off. He’ll zone such and such a number of plots, and that won’t be enough for even those who possibly could pay. There’s no minimum living space in a squatter camp, you know!—

  —He could charge what he likes for his plots?—

  —I’ve seen farmers rent a piece of ground half the size of this room for a hundred rands a month. Rural rack-rent, and we’ve no legal recourse. Exploitation is the other name for the law of supply and demand, my darling.—

  —Maybe. Maybe. In the situation of people with nothing. When it comes to land. Pocket calculators, deodorants, vodka brands … the stuff I’m consulted about—the greater demand you create the greater the competition and the less chance of getting away with exploitation.—

  He spoke in irony but without resentment. A contradiction between the purpose of Bennet Stark’s occupation and the purpose of Vera’s was something that, as with other couples of their kind, of their place and time, was unremarked in their intimacy, part of an accepted ambiguity. For so long this had been a place and time when integrity in many matters could be maintained only by dishonesty, when truth had to survive by lies. If Security (itself a euphemism for threat) came to ask where so-and-so was living, you said you did not know, and, out of necessity to protect yourself as well, might even put Security off on a plausible false trail. If you were going to be a conduit for letters addressed to certain destinations that risked being intercepted by agents at the post office, you hired a mail-box under a fictitious name in a suburb far from where you lived. If there was a rumour that this one or that among acquaintances was suspect as a police plant, you smilingly dissimulated before the person but no longer talked in that company about anything you believed in. You lied by omission, and warned others against association with someone who perhaps was innocent, a name smeared by yet others to cause dissension in your ranks. These were the only ways to defend at least something of the truth against the ultimate lie, the only way to defend the principle of life struggling against death, which is the ultimate, forgotten etymology, not to be found in any dictionary or political speech, of that embarra
ssing word, freedom. So while Vera’s Foundation upheld the right of land and shelter, the object of Bennet’s market research consultancy was to discover for his clients the enticements that distract people from what they really lack.

  But—again, wait!—isn’t there another, everyday, pop-freedom, broadcast everywhere in shops and elevators and the combis which transport everyone in cities and on country roads, an easy-to-use freedom in the choice of buying the beer that champions drink or the hair-relaxer beauty queens advise? Must people forgo the pleasure of the unnecessary, as well as everything else they don’t have? If Bennet had stayed on as Our Male Lead at the university, he would have been teaching a curriculum devised for the level of general education and Western cultural background of white students, difficult to attain for the black students who satisfied entrance standards nominally but came from township schools where boycotts were their history thesis, running battles with the police their epic poetry, and economic theory that of a home where there wasn’t enough money for bus fare, let alone books. So what was the difference, whichever way a failed sculptor might earn a living?

  In some blessed peaceful country, existing far away, an obvious moral contradiction in the activities of a man and woman might destroy the respect that goes with love. But here, for these two, while the great lie prevailed, it was part of a shackle of common experience of what was wrong but aleatory, could not be escaped. They were scarcely aware of its chafing.

  When Oupa had driven two or three kilometres from the Odendaal place the little party from the Foundation stopped on a side road for tea under a tree. Mrs Stark always took along on such trips a flask and a packet of biscuits, sugar in a jar, and a stack of plastic cups. Most welcome, the Odensville man said several times, sitting with his knees neatly together, on the grass. Young Oupa crunched one biscuit after another and every now and then, irresistibly, shook his head and laughed on a full mouth at the encounter they had left behind them. —I know that man. Yoh-yoh! I know him! That kind from the Island, warders just like him. There was one commandant—stood there like a bull in front of you when you came up for interrogation. Never spoke himself, let the other one question you and rough you up, but just standing there he was in charge. If he hadn’t been there, they couldn’t have done the things they did to you. And every time I thought, now it’s coming, now he’s going to start in on me, too. Yrr-ah, man. But he didn’t need to, he just had to be there.—

  Mrs Stark ran her fingers through her hair, a commonplace sparrow ruffling its feathers, and yawned, the yawn turning into a smile, the pleasure she always took in the young man’s ebullience, his awesome way of dealing with his terrible experiences in the indiscriminate narrative style in which he would gossip of something pleasant or funny. The soft red road was empty except for a distant stick-figure zigzagging on a bicycle just below the horizon. The tea was hot and sweet. Beyond a barbed-wire fence where wispy beards of sheep’s wool were caught, veld grasses and weeds streaked in undulations of green woven to bronze and rust where a declivity in the ground had been swampy in summer. Black-and-white plover flung themselves up out of the grass as if they had been thrown, crying out on a single note at human presence. After the battering of responses and emotions in the exchange with the farmer, the irritation and exasperation repressed—and who knows, neither Mrs Stark nor Oupa, what else the Odensville man was experiencing?—calm and quiet fell upon the three as a common bond. After this one unremarkable manifestation of that conflict which rang and babbled about them, in them, a constant garbling of their different lives— suddenly the swallows of hot sweet tea were their only awareness. The paper-flutter of white egrets lifting the sky, the gauzy sleeves of water trailing from irrigation faucets in a vast field of something barely there, barely green; the three rested on the land: this was what it was, not a wrangle in a cross-fire of saliva on a stoep, not folders of documents citing deed, claim and proclamation in the files of a Legal Foundation. Oupa wandered off to pee behind a tree. Mrs Stark, unconcerned about the dignity of her maturity, climbed through the spiky fence with the skill of one used to improvise and found a bush for herself. As she squatted there so privately, the flit of insects in the sun above her head made her drowsy, as if they were some pleasant drug taking aural effect. In an instant measured by the flick of transparent wings, there/away, she felt she was about to lie down on the damp rough grass and dream something she had forgotten. She came back to herself and through the fence again. The Odensville man was still sitting as if at a church meeting. —What about you?—

  But if he understood the brisk reference to the humble call of nature he perhaps thought it an embarrassing familiarity on the part of this woman, from whom he expected the formulations of the law. He dusted the elbows of his jacket as he rose, asking whether she would mind dropping him at a store nearby, he had to see someone. He got out of the station-wagon there, taking off his hat.

  —I’ll be contacting you when I have any news, good or bad. You have my phone number? Yes, keep me posted if there are any developments. One of us’ll come out again some time next week to take statements—if you could get some people together.—

  It was the same sort of professional formula she had used for the farmer, a lawyer must not identify with the anxiety of a client any more than a doctor can function effectively if he begins to feel the pain of his patient.

  A day or night when Vera heard, like a phrase recurring from a piece of music once listened to and out of mind: Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid. We won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children.

  She separated the three statements.

  Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid.

  (Meneer Odendaal) We won’t harm you.

  (Meneer Odendaal) Not you or your wife and children.

  She thought that she had not heard them aright on the stoep that day. The farmer heard them and Rapulana the Odensville man heard them the way she did not, they understood what was being said. The words of tolerance and forgiveness so strangely coming from the Odensville squatter dweller, shaming her for the crude aggression of the farmer, were not tolerance and forgiveness but a threat. Remember, Meneer Odendaal, we are thousands on Portion 19, our Odensville. We are there across the veld from you, every night. You have dogs, you have a gun, but we are thousands, and we can come across the veld to this house, this house where you and your wife and your children are asleep, and, as you said about us if we don’t go from Portion 19, that’ll be your funeral.

  Transit

  Chapter 3

  You don’t know who this is?

  On her way in the city, coming up to the street from the underground garage where her car had its regular booth, a creature within its range of burrows walking the block to the Foundation from the bank, a coffee bar where she might have joined a friend or the Italian restaurant where occasionally she and Ben, in the observance of a forgotten retreat for clandestine lovers, met for lunch, Vera sometimes found herself stopped by someone who was searching for recognition to come from her.

  You don’t know who this is?

  The chestnut satin skin of a young black woman now darkened and puckered beneath the eyes, the saucy jut of dancing buttocks now built into a monument of solid, middle-aged flesh; a figure of a man with one tired shoulder lower than the other, shining pink dome where Vera would have recognized only the lost blond curls, another whose belly-fat, straining gaps between shirt buttons, had swallowed the slender black Jonah (that really happened to be his name) she and Ben had hidden from the police in Ben’s office before he fled the country—who would suspect a market research consultancy of harbouring one of the leaders of the uprising in ‘76. Some had come from their years in prison, some were the first of those returning from exile. As they talked, hands grasped, sometimes embracing, the double embrace first clasped round this side of the neck then that, which everyone in the liberation movement forgot was derived from the embrace of dictators, Vera and these old acquaintances and friends were giddy with discovery, th
e past set down on the streets of the present.

  You don’t remember me?

  The past is known to be irretrievable. But here that proposition is overturned.

  In the euphoria of being back, of presenting themselves alive, resurrected from the anonymity of exile, of these who have returned, and the eager desire of those who have stayed at home to make up, in welcome, for the deprivation of exile they have not suffered, people who had had reason to distrust or simply dislike one another and people who once had been close as brothers and sisters are all greeted in the same way as cherished returning heroes. It is something of the same phenomenon as young Oupa’s lively accounts that do not discriminate between terrors he has experienced and the everyday gossip of the Foundation’s personnel. A convention came instantly into being, as conventions often do, to serve where it seems established patterns of behaviour don’t. Yet beneath it, under the disguise of flesh, behind the sunken eyes, within the clothes of a foreign cut, the black leather caps of East Germany, the dashikis of Tanzania, the Arab keffiyeh worn as a scarf, the old events and circumstances exist; standing there in the street, the old dependencies, the old friendships, the old factional rivalries, the old betrayals and loyalties, political scandals and sexual jealousies were not gone for ever but persisted in evidence of traceable, ineffaceable features, visible cell structure, still living. The past was there.

  Perhaps because of the break in continuity this was so. If the satin skin had been seen slowly bruising dark with age and heavy drinking, if the blond curls had been observed, in the course of ordinary encounters, thinning, if Jonah had been heavier, maturing each time he dropped in for talk and a beer with Ben, the changes would have wound away naturally in the reel of years. But there was no tape running between the state of being they had been in when they left for exile or prison and their sudden reappearance back here where they had left: the weight their lives had was the weight of the past, out of storage and delivered to those who had stayed behind.