None to Accompany Me

by Nadine Gordimer

  He duly held the object horizontally, raised from the pillows, weighing it on his palms. —Where shall I hang it? Above the desk, or here over the door perhaps.—

  She slapped her thighs, sending the satin shivering. —It’s not an ornament! It’s to walk with! Keep your weight down! Don’t think I bring you presents without a double motive, dear— Her voice climbed its scale of laughter. She swung herself off the bed and he could hear her going from room to room, inspecting the traces of her absence, closing cupboard doors in Mpho’s little room, clanging the kitchen bin shut on something he or Mpho had neglected to throw away. The walking-stick rested across his chest. He opened his eyes. She appeared in the bedroom doorway, as she had from a distant country at dawn, but in her dressing-gown, her arms crossed under her breasts. —Aren’t you getting up?—

  —What’s the hurry.—

  —Oh come on. I’m hungry.—

  So she wanted him there in the kitchen to deliver to him a lecture on the results of her trip while they prepared breakfast together. She was trying it out on him—he was a comrade, experienced in such presentations, after all—before she prepared a report. It has been an assignment in Africa—where else could that stick have come from—she’d been sent to negotiate the takeover by that country’s Government of a school for exiles’ children and various other buildings the Movement had had there. The National Executive left it to her diplomacy to see whether these assets, no longer needed, should be handed as a gift to a country that had given asylum, or whether it might be possible to expect some sort of compensation—the Swedes had funded the school and added living quarters for the teachers, so there was some improvement to the property since the host government donated the land. —Dinner with the President, flowers sent to my hotel room and all (I like it better when they send fruit, but only Europeans do that, aih, on our continent people don’t think fruit’s a treat). A lo-ong explanation from him on how we should run things here, my God, if you wrote out all the advice we get it would circle the world—not a word about any compensation deal for the property. The next day there was the great ceremony of the handing-over, President’s guard, military band, more speeches, mine as well, but the best I could do when I got the Minister in his office was to get out of him the promise of an agricultural training project, quite small, they’d arrange for a few students we could send up there, tuition free but living expenses our responsibility. I don’t think I can recommend that as worth taking up? Better that I come back with empty pockets than something we don’t want.—

  —And the camp?—

  She signalled two slices of bread to be put in the toaster. She went into one of her repertoire of elaborate gestures, throwing hands wide, bringing them together with a slight clap that mocked the attitude of prayer, leaning elbows on the kitchen table with a slumping sigh.

  —Did you see Matthew or Tatamkulu?—

  —Who … —

  —You know.—

  —Not there any more.—

  —So you did go.—

  —I had instructions. Just delivering I didn’t ask what— some documents.— It was said as if this were to be the last word on the subject. But he, not she, had once operated in that camp, it was one of the periods when he disappeared from the exiled homes they occupied in Europe and Africa. His was a right to ask about that camp where spies who infiltrated the Movement were imprisoned, although it was not a subject for general discussion. Recently there had been released by the Movement a public report of things done there; unspeakable things. When the report was about to come out he had thought he’d better tell her what he had never told her: that for a time, a desperate time when the Freedom Fighters and the Movement itself were in great danger by infiltration, he had been an interrogator— yes—a jailer, there. He’d told her the code names of others who were running the place and how two of them had joined him, eventually, in protest against the methods being used to extract information. She knew, all right, about whom he was enquiring when he mentioned those names.

  —It’s not closed down, then.—

  She lifted her chin and blinked wearily. —In the process of. I didn’t see much sign of life.—

  —Did anyone say what arrangements are made when inmates are released, who is it that brings them back here? Is it the government agencies who sent them to infiltrate—or are they just being abandoned, that sort of outfit wants to pretend it never existed, these days. They seem to get here anyway, ready to be used against us in other ways. Recycled … Well, we couldn’t think that far ahead; there were a lot of things we couldn’t think about in that place.—

  —No one talked to me, I handed over what I had to. That was that.—

  —It’s not like you to be satisfied to be a messenger.— He put plates in the sink, his back to her; turned his head.

  She was yawning and yawning as if her jaw would dislocate with the force and she wandered out of the kitchen. Gone back to bed to sleep off the journey: but no, she appeared, dressed, eyes made-up, briefcase and keys in her hand, on her way to her office. He sat in his pyjamas over the mug of coffee he had reheated for himself. Ashamed, was that it? She was ashamed that he had ever been involved in that camp where the methods of extracting information by inflicting pain and humiliation learnt from white Security Police were adopted by those who had been its victims. Ashamed, even though he’d finally got himself out of the place, refused to carry on there. Refused, yet understood why others could do the terrible things they did; she was a woman, after all, she could understand revolution but she didn’t understand war.

  He sat on in the kitchen aware of the irritating drizzle of the tap he had not fully closed but unable to distract himself by getting up to turn it off.

  No. Not ashamed; wary of her political position, calculating that since his code name had not been listed in the public report, she was not tainted, through her connection with him, under the necessity of leadership to discipline and perhaps in some cases expel from the Movement anyone who was involved. Unspeakable: even the subject, for Sibongile. She does not want, even in private, any reminders, any familiarity with names, from him. She has her position to think of. He had the curious remembered image, alone in the kitchen, of her frantically and distastefully scraping from the sole of her shoe all traces of a dog’s mess she had stepped into.

  She had made the bed and placed the walking-stick on the cover. Mpho had ear-rings and trinkets from her mother’s part in delegations to a number of countries; he had this. It’s to walk with. A present for a retired man, who should be content to pass time pleasantly taking exercise.

  Sally Maqoma chose the restaurant and is known to the waiters. She orders sole. —You know how I like it, grilled, not swimming in butter or oil, and plenty of lemon, bring a whole lemon.— She and her old friend Vera Stark have tried many times to get together (as they term it) and for once Sally has a free hour to squeeze between morning appointments and a meeting in Pretoria at two-thirty for which a driver will pick her up. They talk politics on a level of shared references—Vera through her work and connections is privy to most of the negotiations which go on while the political rhetoric suggests that there can be no contact—but Sally rarely lets slip any political confidences. Vera is aware of this and knows how to respect evasions while yet interpreting them. As they eat, and drink mineral water Sally has been advised by her doctor to take copiously, Vera is both listening to her friend and piecing together rumours to fill lacunae in the spontaneity of the discourse. What Sally doesn’t say suggests or is meant to suggest that the delegation to Pretoria (Sally has spoken of ‘the three of us’ having hastily to go there) is to meet some Government minister on the education crisis, but it might well be that the meeting was one of those of the Movement rumoured to be taking place with right-wing groups at those groups’ request. Vera tried to superimpose the bearded and side-whiskered outline of a figure in commando outfit over the lively, sceptical black face so voluble opposite her. She could try a general question. —I
s there anything in the newspaper speculation that the AWB and their kind want to talk?—

  Sally raised eyebrows and poked her head forward comically. —Sounds unlikely.— She took a long draught and, as she put the glass down close to Vera Stark’s hand, let her touch nudge it. —Everything unlikely has become likely. That’s our politics these days.—

  In their laughter the side-current of family lives surfaced, the intimacy of the times in one another’s four walls when they had pooled their children, danced to Didy’s records; the weeks when, on return from exile, the Maqomas had moved in with the Starks. —Did I tell you, some changes. Ivan’s divorced, and Ben’s father’s living with us now.—

  —Oh naughty Ivan. Young people are not like us, no staying power. But I remember, she wasn’t much of a personality, you said …? It mustn’t be too good for you, having the old man in the house.—

  —I’ve always got on all right with him but he needs time, from others. Us.—

  —Get someone in to look after him, Vera, you can’t do it, you mustn’t. You’ve got more important things … I’m sure I can find someone for you, there’re always people coming round my office, out-of-work nurses, nice elderly mamas, long-lost cousins, God knows what—I’ll find someone who can live in, that’s what you need.—

  —I don’t know. D’you know it’s going to be awful to be really old, no one wants to touch you any more, no one likes the smell of your skin, no one ever kisses you … And Ben’s never loved his father, it seems. Some sort of resentment from childhood, you know those mysteries no one but the one who was himself the child can understand.—

  —Ben? Really? Ben’s such a darling, such an affectionate man.—

  The limits of confidences between two people constantly shift, opening here, there closing off one from the other. Vera Stark could not speak what she was saying to herself, Bennet loved, Ben loves, only me; loves in Ivan only me, and what shall I do with that love— The thought rising like a wave of anxiety trapped in voices at a restaurant full of people; no place to deal with it. —I hear Didy’s commissioned to do a book. A history of the exile period, is it?—

  —He’s supposed to be researching. Don’t ask me … Let’s order coffee— Sally had the alert shifting glance of a bird on a tree-top, surveying the comings and goings of waiters. When the coffee came she arranged the cups and poured, measuring out words with the flow. —Half the time he doesn’t even get up in the mornings. I go to work, I don’t know what time he gets round to shaving and so on. Always some pain or ache. When I say in the evening, how did it go today—I mean, Vera, I’m showing interest, I’m talking about whether he’s written letters to people who can give him material, whether he’s organizing his notes— then he’ll say something like, How did what go? To put me down. To imply I’m humouring him … Because of where I’ve been all day, at headquarters. Is what happened my fault? Can I help it? He’s got to stop this wallowing in self-pity. I can tell you (her eyes shifted focus, round the neighbouring tables, where other people’s talk and self-absorption made a wall of protection) I’m beginning to find it disgusting. He doesn’t realize that; it disgusts me.—

  This confidence almost alarms; to meet it means it should be matched, and Vera does not know, does not yet understand, what it is exactly that she needs to confide, or if that impulse is any longer something to be heeded. Who can give answers? A bearded man in a preacher’s dog-collar stood in the doorway, How mean of you Vera.—He’s become history rather than a living man. How can anyone be expected to accept that about himself.—

  Sally made a fist above her cup, she was shaking her head vehemently. —That’s just the problem. He does think he’s history. He’s copping out because he’s not centre stage any more, he sees himself as history and history stops with him. He won’t accept that it goes on being made and we all have to make it, my part has changed, his part has changed. He’s still a living man who has work to do even though it can’t be what he’d choose.—

  —Writing a history? That’s the past.—

  Sally leant on the table in silence but did not let it widen between them. —I came back from a trip—a mission—you’d think I’d never been away. He doesn’t bring me home.—

  They are not two young women, after all, exchanging bedroom secrets. Vera may take the odd phrase as some locution for welcome slipped in from an African language. And she’s white, she has never known what exiles have, the return of your man from god knows where doing god knows what he had to do (Didymus’s name as someone connected with one of those camps luckily hasn’t become public). She may or may not have understood what Sally is saying. Didymus doesn’t bring her home by making love to her, as she used to, for him.

  When Didymus did make the approaches of love-making Sibongile felt no response. Mpho had appeared from her room one evening charmed—in the sense of talented, gifted—with youth. The clarity of the lines of her body in a scrap of a dress, of her lips and long shining eyes with their fold of laughter at the outer corners, the cheap, wooden-toy ear-rings in the shape of parrots hanging from the delicate hieroglyph of her ears— she was the embodiment of happiness. Waiting to be called for; where was she going? A party, there were so many parties parents couldn’t keep up with the names of all the friends with whom she was apparently so popular. A girl-friend bustled in to fetch her, they chattered their way out. A thin chain looped through a pendant lay curled on the table where she had dropped it after lifting it from her neck over her carefully arranged hair when the friend pulled a face: the pendant clashed with the ear-rings. Didymus poured the chain from hand to hand, smiling. He came into the kitchen where Sibongile stood stirring a stew and, with the pretext of looking to see what was in the pot, leant his chin on her shoulder. His hand came round over her belly that was swelled forward as she moved the meat about with a fork, circled the navel in a half-humorous caress in anticipation of a meal, and then moved down over her pelvis a moment.

  After they had eaten she seated herself at the computer they had bought for his work on the history of exiles. Staring at the luminous waver of the screen a moment, arrested, as if for some indication whether he had used it that day at all; she turned to him.

  —Go ahead.— He chose to understand that she was asking whether he needed the machine now. She spilled out and sorted her papers exasperatedly. He switched on the TV, volume low in order not to disturb concentration on whatever it was she was writing. Swells of music and the exaggerated pitch of broadcast emotions emanated from where he sat, as she removed from and inserted words and phrases in a speech she was due to deliver in a few days. His back faced her every time she lifted her eyes from the juggled text swimming in phosphorescence; something about the droop of the head showed that he wasn’t seeing, he wasn’t hearing. Didymus was asleep, carried along, unconscious, like a drunk at a carnival, in the meaningless impersonal familiarity of the medium that invades everywhere and recognizes no one.

  In their bed he took up the caress begun in the kitchen. His hand slid from her hips pressing firmer and firmer, smaller and smaller circles over the mound of her pubis, working fingers through the hair and slipping the index one, as if by chance, to touch through the lips. She flung back the covers and swerved out of bed, the mooring of his hand torn away. She stalked about the room with the air of looking for something and when aware of him watching her went out into the other rooms.

  She came back and offered: —Verandah light wasn’t left on for Mpho.—

  —I turned it on.—

  —You didn’t.—

  —My memory, these days …—

  She lay beside him, not saying goodnight in case this provided an opening for him to try to rouse her again.

  That night, or another night, she woke in a tension of sadness in which she and he were lost together, bound, sunk. The sound of their breathing strung tight between them but the divide of darkness could not be crossed, the weight of fathoms could not be lifted. He had not forgotten the light for Mpho. The pain o
f repentance, so useless, for this stupid little spite was actual between her ribs, something conjured up from the religious pictures pasted to the kitchen walls in her grandmother’s house in Witbank location, where she grew up. She seemed to be living simultaneously in the hum of the night all the images, the moments when she had been most aware of him, scattered through the years. Parted so often; what happens in these partings, his, now hers, in the one who goes away? Is the one who left ever the one who comes back? There are changes in understanding and awareness that can occur only when one is alone, away from containment in the shape of self outlined by another. Such changes can never be shared. Alone with them for ever. The images are postcards sent from countries that exist only in the personality of the subject; you will never visit them. She had to make sure that he was there, some version of himself, even as a shrouded bulk under the bedclothes. She hesitated where to touch him: on the forehead, the hand pressed against a cheek, the neck below the ear, where a pulse answers. She rested her spinal column back to back along the length of his and felt him break wind as he slept.

  Chapter 11

  The old man occupied Annick’s room, so she would have to take what had been Ivan’s and the friend she was bringing would have to share it with her. Ivan’s luxury had been a double bed across which he liked to stretch diagonally his adolescent sprawl. Vera bought a divan to move into the room to accommodate the friend. The old man’s presence already had changed the balance of the house. Sally forgot or had been too busy to fulfil her offer but connections at the Foundation supplied a relative in need of work; the path of the old man’s movements, on the arm of the woman who came to help him every day, intersected and deflected those of Vera and Ben. Vera’s house had the transparent grids of various presences laid upon it—the brief comings and goings of the soldier whose military kit propped against her dressing-table left in the varnish a dent whose cause was forgotten, the clandestine movements Bennet brought in as a lover and established in usage as husband and father, the route the children used to take, out of the window in Annick’s room and in through the back stoep door to get at potato chips in the kitchen cupboard without alerting parents, and the invisible trails of Vera herself, changing the function of a space by bringing Blue Books and White Papers to occupy what had held model plane kits and threadbare stuffed animals, closing windows room by room in a storm, carrying, as if following back in footsteps that have worn grooves in the wood floor of her house, an old photograph to the light. On her barefoot morning scamper to the bathroom the old man might cross her path, wavering ahead with his paralysed hand dangling curled at his side and the other held before him as a blind man senses for obstacles. He was not blind but formed the precautionary habit of keeping the hand in the position of one ready to receive a handshake greeting, because even that side of his body had not survived the stroke unimpaired and it took time and effort to muster the appropriate muscles when the occasion came. She had to remember to wear a gown, as she had done when there were still children at home and a live-in maid coming early from the kitchen to house-clean.