None to Accompany Me

by Nadine Gordimer

  —Oh sorry—turn here, no, left, sorry— Such an apologetic young woman, with her oval face, varnished olive by the mixture of races, in its corolla of springy black hair. Is she apologizing for existing at all, neither white and living far from the wrath that overflows from the black hostels into a fake suburbia nor black and fleeing into the veld from a burning shack? —and I heard someone groaning there outside and what can I do, my mom was trying to stop me, I thought what if it’s Colin so even I get killed I must—

  Ben was shocked. That’s not the kind of attitude you’d expect to have towards young married people. Hurt. Ben, who had been Bennet, the young man who took someone else’s wife while the man was away at war, had fear disguised as disapproval in his face, the withdrawal in his eyes in their dark caves. He did not want his son to suffer any complications in the search for sexual fulfilment and companionship that beckons from that other billboard: Happiness.

  On a straggle of wire clothes were dripping, a woman flung a basin of water to the ground and looked up, a white flag on a dead-branch pole announced something to the initiated—a healer or some other form of counsel for sale, or maybe mealies to be bought—above a shack leaning like a house of cards. Business going on; straggling letters on board or wavering across the corrugations of tin, New York Gents Tailor, Dry Cleaning Depot, Latest Hairstyle Braiding Afro Relaxing, Mosala Funerals, Beauty Salon, a shutter propping up an eyelid of tin where a handful of cigarettes, a few bottles of bright drinks, twists of snuff and dice of chewing gum were ranged. Store. Coal Wood. Turn here. Turn there. Oh Mrs Stark. Combis have widened and channelled the dirt road to the passage of a river in flood, the Legal Foundation station-wagon is carried along, keeping track as the combis draw level so close the elbow of the driver out of his window almost touches the arm of the station-wagon’s outside mirror; held back when the combis stop at speed, without warning, to take on or discharge a passenger.

  —Oh Mrs Stark, I tell you a person can’t go through that, he can’t. When I saw it wasn’t Colin, when I opened the door just a bit and I saw the head, the black man, blood, and the brains—

  Crying, and all she has to deal with the shock and horror come back to her in the telling is a fancy handkerchief patterned with a pierrot’s head, his two crystal tears printed tinsel: Mrs Stark sees as she turns in the gesture of acknowledgement that is all Mrs Stark has to deal with it. For the moment; the Foundation must not flounder in effects, it tackles causes.

  —like at the butcher’s shop, I never knew our brains was like that—

  There is no stain on the doorstep. Neither blood nor the red-veined jelled grey displayed in shallow pans. All has been scrubbed away in the desperate upkeep of housewifely standards. A tall woman is waiting, bony in the way that often comes to African fleshiness from the mixture with European blood, and prematurely aged (she could probably give Mrs Stark a year or two) by the determination to defeat poverty by the virtues of fastidious cleanliness and decency believed to belong without effort to people with money, the rewards of being white. The door is not that of a house but the side-door of a garage; a stove, refrigerator, TV, beds, the family is living there. —Colin’s doing the house on weekends, oh it’s over a year now, a slow business!— The older woman insists on making tea, there’s a granadilla cake with yellow icing, she breaks in for emphasis: —His brother-in-law, my other daughter’s husband, he’s in the trade, and there’s others in the family comes to plaster and so on.—

  —Sundays it’s quite a party!— Distracted from her tears by the comfort of pride, the young one shows Mrs Stark over what will be her house one day, Sunday by Sunday, the breakfast nook, Colin’s clever with his hands he’s doing the table himself, the master bedroom (she calls it), the kids here, with an entrance to the yard for them, the living-dining’s going to have a hatch counter to the kitchen, ma’s room with a separate bathroom and that, this’s the foundation for a patio and braai. The visitor is led outside again to admire the façade. There is no roof yet but on the unplastered wall where the window frames are paneless the replica of a brass carriage lamp is in place just as if it were standing to light the pillared entrance to a white man’s driveway.

  The assertion of this half-built house is so undeniable that both women feel an unreality in returning to the object of Mrs Stark’s presence, which was supposed to be an inquiry into what happened in Phambili Park the night a man was murdered on the young woman’s doorstep. This sort of investigation was not normally within the purview of the Foundation, but on this occasion, as increasingly lately, the connection between the people who had been removed from a site and squatted near Phambili Park because they had nowhere else to go, and the violence from hostel dwellers they were subject to, pursuing them, the disruption this in turn caused residents in a legally proclaimed, upgraded etc. township, was relevant to the Foundation’s case against the removal. The young woman leads Mrs Stark up and down roads in the veld drawn by the rough fingernail of an earth-mover. Woodpecker tapping—building going on wherever you look—the veld an endless offering to the infinity of light that is a clear Transvaal sky, scaffolding standing out in the exaggerated perspective of bareness, de Chirico, Dali, thought they imagined it, Munch saw open-mouthed women fleeing in space from dingy, smoke-smouldering encrustation of shanties, there, over there. But where is Europe, what place has the divorce of a banker in the mind of anyone picking a way over rubble and weeds to the neat hallucination of small houses with their fancy burglar grilles, and flowered bedsheets hung out to dry, someone speaking to families living in garages while the habitation that has existed over years, in their minds, is slowly materialized in walls rising at the rate at which money is saved and free Sundays are available. The normality in these homes—camping out in the garage is home, because it is the first occupation of what has existed in mind—is also hallucinatory. So what is normality? Isn’t it just the way people manage to live under any particular circumstance; the children who are teetering a stolen supermarket trolley under the weight of two drums of water back to the squatter camp (one of the Phambili Park residents’ complaints is that the squatters come over to use their taps)—the children are performing a normal task in terms of where and how they live. They yell and pummel one another, tumbling about as they go. A carriage lamp is the blazon of aspiration, fixed to the wall where a mob smashes a man’s head in.

  Mrs Stark put her notes into the sling bag, assuring that she would find her way back to the city. Without the face of a resident in black areas as escort beside her, she took the precaution of locking the car doors and closing the windows. Moving in a capsule; neither what usefulness her notes will be to the case nor the letter lying beneath the notebook dispelled the unreality of the place just left behind. She was accustomed to squatter camps, slum townships, levels of existence of which white people were not aware; the sudden illusion of suburbia, dropped here and there, standing up stranded on the veld between the vast undergrowth of tin and sacking and plastic and cardboard that was the natural terrain, was something still to be placed.

  She had an urge to pull over to the roadside and read the letter.

  But it was a resort to distraction; just as having to go about her business to somewhere named Phambili Park had served as a reason to thrust the letter half-read into her catch-all bag. And you don’t stop for any reason or anyone on roads these days. With one hand on the wheel, she delved into the bag to feel for the envelope. Ivan a frowning child her own frown of attention always looking back at her from him his habit of fingering his nose while he talked (don’t do it, it’s ugly) at the butcher’s I never knew our brains was like that a carriage lamp to shine out over the grey spill—

  She found she was at the turn-off to the hospital where the soft-voiced witness had said people from the squatter camp had taken refuge. So she drove into the hospital grounds, waved on by security guards, and brought the car to a standstill. But not to read a letter.

  She trudged over raked gravel between beds of re
gimented marigolds towards the wings of the hospital, dodging the hiss of the sprinkler system. Pigeons waddled to drink from the spray; a two-metre-high security fence under the hooded eyes of stadium lights surrounded this provincial administration’s hallucination of undisturbed ordinance. All along the standard red-brick and green-painted walls of the hospital people were collected as if blown there as plastic bags and paper were blown against the fence. Women sat on the ground with their legs folded under skirts and aprons, small children clinging and climbing about them. Men hunched with heads down on their knees, in a dangling hand a cigarette stub, or stood against the walls; looked up from staring at feet in broken track shoes advertised for the pleasures of sport. She greeted some groups; they blinked listlessly past her. She made a pretext for her approach, Were there people living in the hospital? An old woman took a pinch of snuff and pointed while she drew it up her nostrils. Are you sleeping there? A woman tugged at the blanket tied cutting into the shape of her sturdy breasts, needing to accuse anyone who would listen. —They tell us no more place. Here! We sleeping here!—

  Out of the stasis others were attracted. They didn’t seem to understand questions in English or Afrikaans—Mrs Stark knew from experience how people in shock and bewilderment lose their responses in confusion, anyway—but the woman in the blanket spoke for them. —Five days I been here. What can I do? That night those shit take eveything, they kill—look at this old man, no blanket, nothing, the hospital give him blanket, when he’s run those men catch his brother, TV, bicycle, everything is gone from his place—shit!—

  The man was coughing, his knees pressed together and shoulders narrowed over his chest, folding himself out of the danger of existence; the babies sucked at breasts, greedily taking it on.

  —And this woman, she try to go to her home yesterday, in the night she come back again. No good, terrible—

  The woman had the serene broad face that at the end of the twentieth century is seen only on young peasants and nuns, she will have followed her man from some Bantustan to the city that had no place for her, but neither the squatter camp nor the flight from it had had time to redraw the anachronism of her face in conformation with her place and time. She didn’t yet have the tough grimace pleated round the eyes and the stiff distended nostrils of the woman, a creature of prey, who was displaying her.

  She prepared herself obediently to speak. A hump under cloth on her back was a baby. A small girl hid against her thick calves. —Friday there by Phambili where we living they come to get my husband. We run away but there’s plenty people running, night-time, and I don’t see where is my two children, the boys children, I was running with the small ones like this— (raised hands towards her back, carrying the weight)—now I don’t see my two children when I’m come to this hospital. Now yesterday I think I must go back to my house and see where is my children, my boys children, but when I come in the veld I see those men again they by my place—

  She looked to others, someone, to find words for this sight, an explanation, what to do.

  Were they hostel men, did they carry knobkerries, knives, how were they dressed?

  The woman pulled the baby’s legs more securely round her waist and took again the long breath of her panic as she fled dragging her children into the veld, how could she be sure what she saw, how could she know anything but the urgency of her flesh and the flesh of her children to get away.

  What about you—you get a chance to see who they were, the men who came that night?

  The woman with the blanket stood before Mrs Stark on bare planted feet. —Me? You say what you see, your house is burn down or they kill you. Better I see nothing.— A fly was creeping round her cheek under the eye. Too much had happened for her to notice so small a predator treating her as if she were already a corpse.

  And the letter. Lying at the bottom of the sling bag under the notes, under the sign of spilt brains and carriage lamp and the people staring for salvation, becoming dark clusters and clumps along a wall as she walked away from them.

  When she got home—it was too late to go back to the Foundation—she came upon the letter. She was alone in the house that was hers as the bounty of divorce, in an order of life that could take for granted rights and their material assurances—her normality. It’s always been her house; Ben moved in with her, first as lover, then husband. It contains tables, lamps, posters and framed photographs, worn path on a carpet, bed—silent witness to that normality.

  She leant against the windowsill, where there was still sunset light. The handwritten address directed to the Foundation was itself part of the text waiting to be read. Why does he tell me and not his father?

  Why did he know—think—she would understand better? The envelope written in the well-rounded upright script she had seen form from his kindergarten alphabet, sent to a clandestine address like a love letter; a claim to share a secret that should not have turned up again at the bottom of a bag of notes. He cannot possibly know what she does not know herself: whether he is the son of love-making on the floor (in this very room where the letter is in her hand) one last time with the returned soldier, or whether he is the son of his mother’s lover, Bennet.

  He does know. Somehow he does know. She has an irrational certainty. It was always there, can’t be denied; he doesn’t only look like her, in the genes that formed him is the knowledge of his conception. If she has never known who fathered him, he does. The first cells of his existence encoded the information: he is the child of the childless first marriage, conceived after it was over on this bedroom floor in an hour that should be forgotten. The information was always there: when she and Ben took him into their bed for a cuddle, as a tiny child, and in the inner-focussed emergence from sleep his gaze would be fixed on her eyes; when, a grown man, a banker, he danced with her, each holding the other in their secrecy.

  You might have been aware, I think you were aware the last time you were in London that things were not going too well. Alice made me promise we’d keep up the appearance and I gave in—mistakenly, I believe, but when you’re what’s known as the guilty party (that’s my designation with the lawyers …) you try to make small concessions in order not to seem too much of a bastard. I should have known better, not so? Alice was plotting, poor thing, I suppose, every kind of delaying tactic she could think of. I sometimes wish you could be here now to tell her what people like you and I accept, that if you didn’t exactly tell Annie and me, we somehow learned from you about emotions—you can’t fake love. If it’s gone it’s gone. She wants me to stay with her, she says she doesn’t ask me to love her. She’s grown to be the kind of woman who’s content to be used like a prostitute, I should go on sleeping with her for god knows what—hygienic reasons, what she thinks of as the sexual needs of men that have nothing to do with love. She doesn’t understand for a moment that the idea fills me with disgust. I don’t want a vessel for my sex. Vera, I’ve outgrown her, she’s the little girl I took to school dances. For a long time I’ve had nothing I could discuss with her, not my work, not what’s in the newspapers, not my ideas about life. If it’s not concerning Adam, his earache, his school marks, whether he needs a new tennis racket, there’s nothing. I can’t live like that and I’m not going to be party to her weak choice to do so.

  I have another woman. Have had, of course, for a long time. She hasn’t pressed me into divorcing Alice, I can tell you that. She’s not the type to go in for emotional blackmail. She’s a Hungarian redhead, if you want to know what she looks like (!), half-Jewish, and she’s very bright, an investment banker. There’s no messy tangle on her side, her husband died at thirty-nine five years ago, a brain tumour. No children. I don’t know whether to contest Alice over Adam. He’s almost grown up. She’s got a strong case for custody, but doesn’t an adolescent boy need a father, more? Difficult for me to judge, because I had both. All the old clichés of what’s best for him etc. Sometimes I just want to get out, I’d agree to anything. Other times, I feel bad about the boy. This i
s beginning to sound like one of the soap operas Alice watches on tele and quickly switches off when I come in, to pretend she doesn’t. No doubt every divorce is a soap opera. And you get addicted to your own soap opera, never mind the important things that are happening in the world. I’ve just come back from Moscow, the refinancing of part of the arms industry to make vehicle components, the swords into ploughshares operation. But it’s so much more profitable to sell arms, and they need money, no financial aid consortium can give them what can be earned by selling to the Middle East. I’m enclosing a photograph. We’re at some dinner in Budapest a few months ago. She’s the redhead next to the fat man standing up making a speech.

  But there was no photograph. He must have thought better of it; had the instinct that a photograph, a face ringed, is no way to announce a betrayal.

  When she heard Ben come in, his relaxed home-coming sigh as he paused in the passage at the bookshelf where the day’s mail was always left, her concourse alone with Ivan’s letter sank away; the reason why Ivan didn’t write to Ben was because Ben is his father, of course, must be; he knows how deeply Ben loves him, and doesn’t want to upset him with the sudden evidence of any unhappiness or instability in his son’s life.

  Vera threw away the envelope.

  Chapter 7

  Who are the faces arranged in a collage round the great man himself? The posters are curling at the corners and some have faded strips where sunlight from a window has barred them day after day, month after month. Crowds who dance their manifesto in the streets are too young to recognize anyone who dates from the era before exile unless he is one of the two or three about whom songs were sung and whose images were kept alive on T-shirts. Didymus went about mostly unrecognized; disguised, now, as himself.