None to Accompany Me

by Nadine Gordimer

  It simply was not possible, for Sibongile; not possible, if she was what she had taken responsibility to be in the Movement, for her to telephone and leave a message that her chair would be vacant—because? Because a foolish child had got herself into a mess and punished her mother by leaving a deserted bed. When she was ill and alone, in London, with a baby to care for, could she expect to call her husband back from wherever they might have sent him, another country, another continent?

  She stood there, looking at Didymus, unable to leave. All the partings and reappearances, the arrivals and departures, the climates and languages, the queueing for rubber-stamped entry and exit were present between them, as a wind gathers up a spiral of papers in dust.

  He released her. —Go on. I’ll call. I’ll leave a message for someone to slip to you.—

  The lift did not move; he stabbed at each button in turn. A beer can rolled into one corner had dribbled its dregs and caked dirt on the floor. He climbed stairs and walked corridors to number One-Twenty-One, passing napkins, T-shirts and underpants hung to dry over the burglar bars of kitchen windows, doors with their sections of stippled glass replaced by cardboard, bags of trash in doorways, a bicycle frame without wheels he had to step round: our people moving into the shell of middle-class life without the means or habits that give it any advantage. So they inhabit it and destroy the very thing they believe they wanted. It becomes the ghetto we think we’ve escaped. Only it costs much, much more. The white landlord cuts the water supply because ten people in a two-roomed flat, multiplied by ten storeys, strain the sewage system beyond the capacity it was installed for; the rent falls into arrears and the electricity supply is disconnected. This building with its mirrored foyer and panelled lifts hasn’t got there yet but it’s on the way, it’s on the way. Isn’t this what our ‘education for democracy’ is all about, after you’ve learnt to make your cross on a bit of paper, after you’ve learnt not to allow yourself to be bribed or intimidated to vote for someone you don’t trust to govern your life: it’s about not occupying the past, not moving into it, but remaking our habitation, our country, to let us live within the needs of space and decency our country can afford. And that’s what the whites have to learn, too. Luxury’s a debt they can’t pay. A good thing he wasn’t called upon to make speeches any more; something more easily recognizable as rousing than this would be required.

  Unlikely the bell worked. He struck the stippled glass with his knuckles and waited; if the answer were to be a long time in coming, he supposed she was there; he felt a eurve of sorrow wash over him, as if he had come to fetch his little girl from some misdemeanour at that English school she had attended paid for by white fellow-travellers, and was about to meet her humiliation. Bloody fucking bastard: suddenly he joined Sibongile in anger against Vera’s nice young man. But a watery dark outline had appeared on the other side of the glass door; it opened and he was there, barefoot, in running shorts, a thick slice of bread with a bite out of it, in one hand; at once showing in his face that he felt foolish caught like that.

  Didymus spoke Zulu—it was Sibongile’s, not his own language and he didn’t know what this man’s was, but every black in Johannesburg at least understands Zulu, he needed a lingua franca other than English for this occasion. Was the girl there?

  No.

  He was not asked to enter but saw at once that it was unnecessary.

  You know her friends, your friends. Do you know where she might be.

  Uncomprehending: She’s not at her home?

  She’s disappeared since last night. You know some friends … where she would go?

  The young man slid a glance at the piece of bread he could not drop, came back with an open face, upper lip faltering before he spoke confidently, no doubt at all: Her grandmother. There in Alex.

  Mpho.

  That’s Mpho.

  Their girl was ironing on the kitchen table in the Alexandra house where her father had come to live as an infant when his parents left the Transkei. So many countries, cities, rooms, hideouts, personae—and now his daughter was ironing sheets on that same table in that same kitchen, a doek tied over her fancy hair-style. She said as if they were unwelcome neighbours dropped in, Hullo.

  The old lady was peeling potatoes into a basin on her spread lap.

  They spoke in their family language, Xhosa. —Why should I phone you? She often comes, doesn’t she? I thought you knew—every time. Why must I phone?—

  —But Mama, didn’t Mpho tell you?—

  —What should she tell me, my son. You say.—

  Sibongile’s elegance, the hound’s-tooth tweed suit and knotted silk scarf, high-heeled patent shoes and sheen of matching navy blue stockings emphasizing her stance before all that was familiar to him and his mother within the four walls; the old grey-painted dresser with its display of enamel plates, mugs on hooks, three-legged alarm clock ticking, the refrigerator with wadded newspaper under one lame leg, the enormous scoured aluminium pots on the stove, his childhood reassurance against hunger through many lean times, the calendars illustrated with pink blondes and fluffy puppies, the framed Last Supper and blurred certificates of children’s prowess, long ago, at bible class, Didymus Maqoma’s matric certificate—these powerful inanimates stood back from Sibongile’s presence.

  —I think Mama knows what her granddaughter told her. We don’t have to go over it.— Sibongile spoke a mixture of her own Zulu with what she knew of Xhosa, not to be seen wanting in respect. But English was the medium for Mpho, English was the reminder to her that there was no running away from what she was, what circumstance made of her, a girl who had to have lessons in order to claim a mother tongue. Once home, the new world had to be made of exile and home, both accepted. In the vocabulary Sibongile herself had absorbed unconsciously through the circumstance of exile in London she found this next escapade—Alexandra—what the English called tiresome—yes, plain tiresome, mixed with a concealed hysterical relief that the girl was alive and safe. —Mpho, why did you have to go off in the middle of the night or whenever it was, not leave a note or anything. Nobody would have stopped you if you’d said you wanted to spend the next few days with gogo. It was just silly, darling.—

  At the end of ‘the next few days’ was the appointment with the doctor Vera had found.

  Ah, so it was still silence: the girl didn’t look up, was expertly folding the sheet in four, testing the iron with the hiss of a finger first moistened by her tongue, and then running the iron over the neat oblong. But the old lady was ready to speak. —Our people don’t do this thing. Our children are a blessing. We are not white people. Didymus is my son. Mpho is my child. This child will be my child. I will look after the child here, in my house. I have told Mpho.— She stood up, put aside the basin of potatoes.

  Didymus rose, too, from the plastic chair whose screws on metal tube legs he had been turning in patient forbearance. He went over to Mpho and put his hand gently on her nape, the gesture of love familiar to both his women, wife and daughter. —One day Mpho will have children she’ll care for herself. That’s the way it’s going to be for her. But it can’t be now. Thank you, Mama, Sibongile and I, we thank you for looking after her so well; we’ll come back to fetch her at the weekend.—

  Careful that the movement should not be interpreted by him as a rejection of his hand on her neck, Mpho slowly looked up, untied the doek from her head, laid it on the table, and turned, ready, to her father.

  Chapter 15

  A lawyer and a clerical assistant, both of the Legal Foundation, were attacked this week while on an investigative tour of State-owned land the Government proposes to sell off to private ownership in advance of the installation of an interim government. The Foundation has criticized the Government’s intention to ‘offer this land to speculators and developers when a future government expects to use it to solve the enormous land and housing crisis existing in the country’.

  What play of inference and preconception, this way or that, comes between t
he news item on an inside page and what has happened as an interruption of or, maybe, the culmination of certain directions. In the context of newspaper headlines, the nightly sheet-lightning of violence, psychedelic entertainment darkening and flaring on the television screen, this must be an attack by black hatred on a white foolish enough to think she had any reason to be in areas whites themselves had declared fit only for blacks; or it could be an attack by white hatred of white collaborators with blacks’ intention to seize land—the land!—for themselves. Either way, serve the victims right.

  And the third possibility. Created as climate creates conditions, accepted like the lack of rain—the couple could have been robbed because they didn’t lock the doors, they didn’t keep the gun handy, they should have had the sense to stay at home. Stay out of it.

  Mrs Vera Stark sustained a bullet wound in the leg and Mr Oupa Sejake was wounded in the chest.

  What were they doing on a road far from the site of any State land on their itinerary? To know that would be to have to enter their lives, both where they touched and widely diverged, to be aware of what they knew about each other and what they did not know; where they had expectations, obligations operating covertly one upon the other. To know at least that much.

  Vera could not know whether, by acting as procuress of an abortion for Oupa’s girl, she was someone to whom he felt he owed gratitude or resentment. The old woman said—Didymus had told her—We are not white people. Didymus dismissed this smiling, in passing. But maybe Oupa would have liked to have a child, somewhere, souvenir of the beautiful girl who was not for him, out of his class, speaking and moving in the manner of cities he had never seen, yet at the same time a black girl, sharing the precious familiarity, the dangerous condition of being black, for which he had dredged seaweed and broken rocks on a prison island. Oupa didn’t have his wife and children with him in One-Twenty-One; what difference if there were to have been another child, likeness of hours of love-making and virility, to be visited with gifts at the home of some grandmother?

  He didn’t bring his plastic container of pap and curried chicken-leg to keep company in Mrs Stark’s office. He didn’t discuss problems of his legal studies with her. He was in and out with papers and messages and talk on Foundation matters continued between them as usual, but there were no lively asides from him, he kept his eyes on papers or unfocussed, to concentrate on what was being discussed; only occasionally, from the door, as if he had forgotten something, in what was barely a pause: his smile.

  This—to her—self-punishing attitude became more and more unnecessary; she found herself increasingly impatient with the idea that he should have to feel exaggeratedly contrite, to the extent that this was carried over to his demeanour at work. If he thought it was expected of him by her, she didn’t know how to convey to him that this certainly was not so. The image of Mpho, brought to mind by his behaviour, changed outline, developed, on reflection. That charmer was fully aware of, became completely in control of her attraction; quite as much capable of seduction as a man; this young man. There was never any suggestion that she’d been raped, or even found herself innocently in a situation where submission to unwelcome desire was difficult to repulse. Sly little miss lied to her parents, made friends collude with and cover up for her when she went to make love in that flat; the love-nest of two generations.

  On the three-day drive around the country the atmosphere between Mrs Stark and Oupa was easier but still was created only by exchanges of reaction to what they saw and to whom they talked in relation to their task. They spent a night in a Holiday Inn where Oupa swam in the pool and she, drinking a beer on the terrace, saw no objection, from the party of white farmers at the next table, to his presence among their splashing, shrieking children. Even at the dorp hotel they slept in the second night, a place where the proprietor and his wife slumped before the television set in the bar lounge while a receptionist-cum-barman took the guests’ particulars, their arrival was accepted with listless resignation. The dorp was dying; local farmers who used to fill the bar had abandoned their farms and moved to town during the years when they feared for their security from groups of black guerrillas infiltrating from over the border; those farmers who had formed commandos and stayed, then, were now trying to sell their farms before blacks reclaimed land under a majority government. But in the meantime without the patronage of black drinkers in the public bar the hotel would be abandoned, too. From his armchair the proprietor called out in Afrikaans —Show mevrou and meneer to their rooms, Klaus, show where the bathroom is.—

  They laughed together over this as they had not laughed since Oupa summoned her to the flat. The factotum dragged back and forth serving a dinner of mutton, mealie rice and pumpkin they ate with satisfaction, as people retain a taste for the dishes of their country others would find dull and unappetizing. In his high-collared white jacket moulded in sweat-dried contours like a plaster cast containing his body, listing on shoes cut out on the uppers to ease bunions, the old black man brought Oupa’s third can of beer.

  —Didn’t your baas see me when he told you to show the meneer his room, Baba?—

  In the black face darker-streaked with age the mouth gaped on a thick pink tongue. He looked slyly, comically round the empty dining-room before answering in his language. Oupa, clasping the old man’s arm, laughed as he translated for her: The white man doesn’t want to see nothing. Nothing any more. Nothing nothing.

  In the quiet of an early-morning start in another part of the country, an empty road, hornbills taking off from cowpats they were pecking at as the Foundation station-wagon approached, Oupa spoke as if to himself—This’s only about fifty kilometres from my uncle’s place. Where my wife stays with the kids. The turn’s just over there at the trees.—

  She was watching the approach of the stand of eucalyptus; they neared; she could see long swathes of swaddling bark peeling from their white trunks.

  —Let’s take it.—

  He turned his head to her. —We go there?—

  —Yes.— Mrs Stark authorizing transgression of one of the strictly honoured rules of the Foundation: the Foundation’s vehicles are not to be used for private purposes. And Vera added—Why not. It makes no sense for you to be so close, and drive on.—

  So that day when they should have been heading for the city and the office she offered him a joy-ride; not in the usual sense, of aimless pleasure, but the joy of restoration, union, in some—tentative—compensation for the sundering that outcast him, in his sense of self, in what she knew of him in the city.

  He asked no questions. That he didn’t was in itself a dissolve of constraint and a return to the old simple confidence between them. He opened his window to let the morning air gush in wide, he slotted a Ladysmith Black Mambazo cassette into the player, he drove faster; it was as if he had downed a couple of the beers he enjoyed so much. —You give me the green light, okay. I’m going to stop at a store. Get some sweets and things.— As they neared the settlement there were roadside venders selling mounds of sweet potatoes and onions and an Indian store into whose dimness he disappeared in skipping strides. He came out with chips and Jelly Babies, clear plastic guns filled with candy pills for the children, and packets of tea and sugar, the gifts poor people offer adults the way rich visitors offer flowers.

  If there had been somewhere for her to wait for him while he made his visit she would have suggested that he leave her there so that she would not intrude. She hung back as two small children threw aside the cardboard box in which one sat while the other pulled it through the dust, and leapt to fling themselves at him. The younger had him by the leg, the elder hung from his neck. Hampered with joy, he staggered through the gap of a fence that had been shored up with strands of barbed wire and off-cuts of tin roofing, and approached the small, sagging mud-brick house, as much part of the features of the country as anthills in the veld. One of the children broke loose and ran inside shouting. There was some exchange; a woman came out, a plump young face screw
ed up, hand shielding her gaze. She greeted—her man? her husband?—respectfully, distantly, in the manner of one expecting an explanation. In their language, he introduced Vera. Shaking hands, brought close to her: the tender roundness of the neck with the gleam of sweat-necklaces in its three circling lines.

  These shelters provided for by men absent in cities fill up with women; in the all-purpose room were several and a baby or two, flies, heat coming from a polished coal stove. The sweetish smell of something boiling—offal?—was swallowed with tea flurriedly made for the white visitor; the children brought her their school exercise books. Perhaps they thought she was some kind of teacher or inspector. In her familiarity, through her work, with homes like this one, scatterings of habitation outcropped along with the trash-pits of white towns, she was accustomed to being regarded as someone to whom it was an opportunity to address a demand, attention. She and the children chattered and laughed although they had no common language, while she admired their drawings and painstaking calligraphy. Time passed—some idea the visitors were to wait for the eldest child to come home from school. But he did not appear, and his father was not surprised or perturbed. —It’s far. And they play on the road, you know how kids are. Sometimes I myself, I used to be the whole afternoon, coming home, forgetting to come …— From the cajoling, laughing tone of his voice he was telling the mother not to be angry with the child, but she jerked her head in rejection. Such movements of self-assertion surfaced from the withdrawn placidity with which she kept her place. Sitting at the kitchen table, she might be any of the other women murmuring there. Her man from the city talked and she responded only to questions, now and then giggled when others did, and covered her mouth with her hand. The sun shifted its angle through the window barred with strips of tin; he decided, turning to his fellow visitor —Time to get going, hei— And while the farewells were being made to all the women, the children hung again about him. Their heads caressed under his hands storing up the shapes, he asked—undercover—whether his employer could help him out? —The loan of twenty rands or so.—