None to Accompany Me

by Nadine Gordimer

  He wandered with a smile of strange sweetness from encounter to encounter, not that he had become simple-minded but because he was reliving the sense of achievement a child has when first it masters how to walk, and the house represented to him territory daily conquered. He did not seem to mind the wheedling patter of Thandeka, who winked and gesticulated behind his back in comment on his infirmity and pride in his progress. How is he today, Ben would enquire of her in the presence of his father; and the hand that he might have touched sank uncertainly out of the way. He bought his father specialist journals and newspapers that should be of interest—he had been a chemical engineer—and left them on the table beside the old man’s chair in lieu of a visit. The woman attendant decided, as part of her responsibility for the old man’s care, what he felt. —Mama, he’s so happy for his granddaughter coming, I tell you, mama! That time she is arrive he’s going to be there, there, mama! So happy! Mama, I’m going to put a nice suit he’ll wear—

  Brought forward on her arm with abstract joy expressed on his behalf as smiling nuns set themselves to beam radiance of the holy spirit and politicians display their amorphous love of humankind, he looked uncertain, for a moment, which of the two young women who arrived was his granddaughter. He had not seen her since she was a high-school girl; but the face, the face of his son, there in hers, was surely unmistakable. Vera and Ben had somehow omitted to mention to her that the grandfather was living with them—as often, with them, each thought the other had done something neither had. But Annick kissed him, took the old hand—cold scaly skin like that of a tortoise she’d kept as a pet as a child—placed it in that of the friend with her, using the childhood form of address. —Grandpops, this is Lou, she’s in biology and she’s just come from a month on your old stamping ground, wasn’t it—Zaire—the Congo.—

  His voice snagged on the effort to speak, but he turned the pause into a mock appeal to Vera. —Of course this young lady’s in biology, we all are biological—what does that mean she does, though?— He enjoyed his little quip and the polite laughter it brought; Ben only smiled, his black eyes unreadable. The granddaughter cuffed her friend lightly so that the girl shook her drape of hair like a mare stung by a fly; both had long hair, but the straight black tresses Annick had from her father had been frizzed since her parents saw her last. —Grandpops she’s a professor, she’s been doing important research up there, fascinating, we’ll tell you about it.—

  —Don’t you believe her, Mr Stark. When we’re at home and I start to talk microbiology to her, her eyes glaze over, all she wants to know about Zaire is what tapes I’ve brought for her, what kind of drums and strings you can still hear there.—

  Annick with their two carry-alls followed Vera to Ivan’s room while the friend took her tea over to the old man and settled for a talk about Zaire. The timidity with which the relation with adult children—actuality defies the oxymoron—is taken up when they return from their lives, surrounded Vera. Each time Annick appeared after absence she was the sudden live manifestation of someone fixed in a painting. The static features in the mind were moving, the details of the texture of the skin, the glance—what is she apprehending, at once, about her mother, about us in this house where she was once one of us? Her scent—not perfume but the smell of her that vaguely reaches back to the odour of her hair when she was observed, sleeping, as a child, by one leaning to hear her breathe. Something missing in that beautiful face? Mustn’t be seen to be gazing for it. Not a change in the line of eyebrows; these are never plucked, they are definitive, seal-smooth and glossy, each tapering at the temple’s hollow. Ben’s sperm made her like that, in his image. Not the frizzing, though that hair-style’s a pity; it’s nothing that’s been altered: something that’s gone. But the last opening with which to take up the relationship with daughter or son is to pass some remark about physical appearance.

  Perhaps one should tell, not ask.

  Offer, not request. Put oneself in their hands, the ex-children. Place there the mystery of the totally unexpected: what am I to do with that love. If a doctor and a professor between them could explain it. Or to place, putting down carefully, a container of secret calm come out of an exaggerated fear of the death of someone not lover, husband, child: what would this young woman who was surely closer than any other woman make of that?

  And all the time Vera was talking in the usual flitting, lightly anxious and excited way of someone wanting to make sure guests would be comfortable. The cupboard was cleared for clothes, the old man would share the main bathroom so the second one was all theirs, the daughter’s and her friend’s. —Sorry the room’s crowded. But with full house now, no other bedroom, it’s all I could do, I bought the divan.—

  Annick thumped the carry-alls on it. She gave a sigh of pleasure as she recognized some poster of her brother’s era that was still on the wall. —Oh you shouldn’t have bothered. We always sleep in a double bed.—

  The androgynous harmony present in Bennet’s male beauty, transformed in this girl’s femininity, her breasts under a loose sweater shrugged together by crossed arms, her pelvis and hips shaped in tight jeans, distracted Vera, she was conscious of something impossible trying to come to her. Instead, a sudden distraction: she realized what was missing in that seductive face. The black punctuation of that beauty, placed exactly as Bennet’s was, below the spread of eyelashes shading the left cheekbone. —What happened to your beauty spot?—

  Annie laughed instructively. —The mole. I had it off. No beauty; moles should be removed, they can turn cancerous, Ma.—

  The usual party to celebrate a son’s or daughter’s visit. The usual people, Legal Foundation familiars—Ben’s new associates in the luggage business remained business acquaintances he didn’t particularly want to bring home—the old friends, once-banned political activists now turned politicians at negotiating tables, and the addition, among the returned exiles, of those whom definitive indemnity at last allowed to disembark without fear of arrest or to emerge from the subterrain beneath home, half-home. A few diplomats of middle rank, useful conduits to overseas funding, now appeared, a member of one of the UN commissions sent to monitor violence in the country; and there was a presence perhaps no one except young Oupa could place, a man introduced by Vera as Zeph Rapulana. He sat all evening in the same chair, while groups formed and broke up in and out of the garden and living-room; coming and going with drinks and food she was aware of the shine of the planes of his features sinking into the gathering darkness like the natural outline of a landscape, part of a view she could always expect to see from her house. But people came to that dark unknown figure, drawn in some way; she noticed them, Didymus, a consul-general, the UN woman whose professional qualification surely was to be enquiring. Annie and her friend Lou, shoes kicked off and feet on the grass, sat on the steps in rising and falling chatter and laughter with Oupa, Didy and Sally’s daughter Mpho, and Lazar Feldman, the young lawyer from the Foundation.

  Ben and Vera cast glances over the gatherings in and outdoors as an airline attendant walks down the aisle of a plane discreetly checking whether seat-belts are fastened. They were with every group and no group, and encountered one another apart from others. He put his hand on her shoulder. The night opened a soaring space above them, dwindling the voices and shapes of the human company they had gathered to a low humming horizon, a thin and distant huddle of life stirring under a vast gaze. Was this all they could muster to set against the trajectory of people thrown off trains that morning; in the house an old man with limbs atrophying; a ship full of nuclear filth prowling round the shores that night with death at a twelve-kiloinetre limit? How far is a twelve-kilometre limit, for death, when this great engulfment of sky cannot be held off? They didn’t speak but drifted together down the steps, past the backs and legs of those sitting there with their daughter, to the garden. The neglected grass licked dew on their ankles; she knelt a moment to bury her hands in it, ants crept up her wrists, crickets filled their ears ringingly, restori
ng the earth’s scale. They strolled on away from their party. —Lazar seems pretty taken with Annie. I can foresee us being left to entertain the girl-friend from now on.—

  Vera became conscious of the hand on her shoulder as if it had just descended there. —I don’t think so.—

  —He’s the kind of man who’d be right. Appeal to her, surely. He isn’t living with some woman, is he? You usually know what’s happening outside the Foundation.—

  —No one permanent, far as I know. Girl-friends, passing affairs.—

  —I’ve got a hunch they’d get on. She hasn’t some big affair going all this time in Cape Town, has she? What about that doctor she once introduced us to, Van der Linde? Would she have told you? This schoolgirl-sharing-a-house, going about girls-together—it’s all right for teenagers but she’s over thirty. I can’t believe it isn’t a smoke screen for something—some love affair with someone who’s married, probably.—

  —She’s living with this girl. She seems happy.—

  —That’s why I think there’s some complication with a man.—

  They walked on. There was a stutter of music from the house, a cassette starting and stopped. Vera halted, and he turned, thinking they were about to return to the house.

  —Ben, they sleep together. In one bed. The other girl doesn’t use the divan. Annie said when I took her to the room the day they arrived, they always sleep together.—

  —My god, what an idea. Childish. She’s a doctor and thirty-something years old. Why not a teddy-bear, as well.—

  They were approaching the steps, the young people there, the house full of others drinking and eating.

  —Would you ever share a bed with another woman.—

  —No. But you know that. We can’t talk now.—

  The party goes on. In the kitchen plates pile on left-over food, Vera washes glasses because Ben’s supply has run out. One or the other, they join this group and that. In a corner of the living-room the stab of interrupting voices vies with the music. A heavy young Englishman in a catfish-patterned dashiki is using the height from which he projects his voice to dominate a discussion on conditions in the liberation movement’s prison camps, which have been the subject of a newspaper exposé. —You can’t make such sweeping generalizations. Things differed from camp to camp. I myself can say—

  A head was dipped disparagingly. —As a journalist, from outside.—

  —Yes, a journalist, poking my nose where it wasn’t welcome. But I wasn’t doing so in the capacity of my work. My brother-in-law happens to have been held in two of those camps so I have the picture from outside and inside.—

  —Your brother-in-law?—

  —Yes, my brother-in-law, my wife’s brother Jerry Gwangwa.—

  A small black woman wearing the Western antithesis of her white husband’s outfit, satin trousers and a string of pearls in the neck of her tailored shirt, stood by looking up now and then to others in the manner of one watching the impression he was making. —But at first they wouldn’t tell you anything, you had to—

  —Why do you talk of things you know nothing about—

  His soft thick throat throbbed like a frog’s. He did not look at his wife as he spoke. —My own brother-in-law was beaten on the soles of the feet, he was strung up, in another camp these methods were not used, it was no five-star hotel but … all depends on who was in command. I had some contact with him … what I know is not secondhand. Jerry’s not bitter although how he happened to be subject to all this—that’s another story, he should never have been there, while there were plenty who certainly deserved to be.—

  Didymus was in the group, a good listener who, Vera saw, contributed nothing. He turned away with her as she moved on, and Tola Richards, the journalist’s wife, joined them.

  —I didn’t know about your brother.—

  She stood, stranded, before Didymus; before Vera. She gestured with her glass as if about to tip its contents in someone’s face. —Oh haven’t you heard it from Alec before? It’s his party piece. Whenever there’s someone who doesn’t know us, he produces his punchline about the brother-in-law so they can be impressed he’s married a black. Don’t you know I’m his passport? I’m his credentials as a white foreigner. Because he can produce me, it means he’s on the right side. That gets him in everywhere.—

  Best thing was to assume she’d had too much to drink; Didymus put his arm round her in a hug and said something to her in their own language. The three of them laughed it off. We can’t talk now. Someone was waving and beckoning to the young woman and she broke away. Didymus and Vera had nothing to say to one another but were comfortable together at a distance each understood the other could not cross. It was, at least, their distance; like a place they had once been to, together. He had lied by means of an ambiguous sentence. What he had hidden by it was: I didn’t know Jerry Gwangwa was your brother. But I do know he was a plant, a South African police agent, nineteen years old, he was sent with a false record of being detained and escaping to make his way to Tanzania to present himself for military training with Umkhonto. He was to encourage dissatisfaction among the trainees, homesickness and drug-taking, and to inform other agents of the movements of military commanders, so that assassinations could be carried out. He was bloodied before he left home; he had killed two youth leaders in their beds and planted a car bomb that killed three others and took the legs of a fourth. He was interrogated by Maxi, code name for Didymus Maqoma. He survived, confessed, and having convinced the Americans he was a Freedom Fighter, was studying for a Ph.D. on a scholarship at one of their universities. Vera could not know what Didy’s preoccupation was, in the eye of silence he and she occupied briefly in the late-night animation around them, but she acknowledged it instinctively. In a long life there are many different pockets of collusion that form with different people out of different circumstances and, although generally forgotten, occasionally jingle there a kind of coinage, a handful of tokens good for re-entry to a shared mood.

  Ben was approaching with an arm round either girl, his daughter and her friend, forced by him into a dancing trot. —I’m telling these two, either we get everyone going with some hot music or it’s time to send them all home.— But he looked deeply tired, the skin around his eyes so dark it seemed each had been struck by a fist, the lines from nose to mouth chiselled heavily, thickening what had been his beautiful lips into drooping coarseness. Once again at a party—as she had seen him as if with the gaze of another, at a party when first he had become lover turned husband—she saw him without the lens of her image of him. Annie, smiling under his arm, was the bearer of that face, now; on him, it was no longer there. Weariness revealed him in spite of or because of the youthful energy he was summoning. —Come, let’s show them.— In the mountains, with muscles lightly trembling from the day’s climb, the love-making, fresh from the shower, they stood together at the invitation of music. There was the same readying slight movement of his shoulders before he took Vera to dance. The others laughed and applauded his expertise, egging him on. The warmth of his body, private in his clothes, was the warmth of the bed they shared. People were looking around for the hosts to say goodbye; she broke away to go to them, trailing his hand for the first few steps. Behind the straggle of Oupa, the Maqomas, Lazar, the Richards and the United Nations envoy, Zeph Rapulana was leaving. She had not had a chance to talk to him the whole night. Sally was embracing her with her usual formula, enthusing —You know just how to do things, what a good time, we must get together— and she saw Zeph Rapulana over Sally’s shoulder. His was a calm she could not reach. He was shaking hands with everyone in his countryman’s courtesy.

  What is a party? For Vera tonight it is a mass of distraction hiding everyone from themselves, a dose of drink and noise that blocks what you don’t want to think about.

  We can’t talk now.

  That night there was another party. When Ben in pyjama shorts (still had the figure for them) went down through the garden to fetch the Sunday paper
from its slot in the gate there was the headline. A wine-tasting in a golf clubhouse had been attacked with hand grenades and automatic rifle fire. Four revellers were killed, others injured. He went slowly back to the house, reading the story, aware in peripheral vision of avoiding a couple of plates and a beer glass with its dregs filled with drowned insects, left on the grass by his guests. He sat on the bed, where Vera still lay, staring unseeing at his fine dark-haired legs as he listened to the radio report of reactions to the attack. Horrible, horrible, said a black bishop; cowardly murder of innocent people, commented a Government spokesman; savagery due to the Government losing control of blacks, according to the white right-wing. And the whole outcry merely because the victims were white, stated the Movement’s rival organization, neither confirming nor denying responsibility for the attack.