None to Accompany Me

by Nadine Gordimer

  Father and son. No end to consequences. This consequence is that the seventeen-year-old boy has become one of Vera’s confidants. He knows there is something about herself she conceals, making other confessions round about it. He does that kind of thing himself, to protect himself from adults. In recognition—another kind of recognition—of this, she lets him drive without a valid licence, and both of them, as friends, are concealing this from Ben.

  She has a need to redefine. Friends. Friends are differing individuals who are the repositories of confidences and confessions. The act of these friendships, in which the various aspects of self cannot be placed all upon one person, is the equivalent of placing the burden of self within the other by which she used to define the sexual act.

  Chapter 24

  Ms Vera Stark, Deputy Director of the Legal Foundation (in the end she has not been able to avoid a title), is among the faces in the newspapers captioned as nominated to serve on the Technical Committee on Constitutional Issues. Vera had heard that her name was being considered, but had not taken the possibility seriously; there were so many commissions and committees sitting, more set up every day either to pass the heat of change from hand to hand or keep an ethos of democracy evolving while the set of the old hegemony theatre was being struck, its now incongruous flats still lumbering people’s lives. Some groups wanted to keep them in the way, hoping that an ivy of acceptability might be able to be painted over them; others wanted to cart the junk off to live by in some enclave of a single skin colour or language, and pranced the streets with guns in mounted commando to make their Nazi neo-Arcadian cause a threat. Some enterprising adapters to a coming order where it might be possible still to make money while losing political control, wanted to lease the ultimate relic of the dead regime’s power, Robben Island, to a resort developer. A former political prisoner whose people the Foundation was representing in a land dispute made to Vera the counterclaim: We spent our lives there. We earned it. The Island is ours.

  Vera was cautious not to decide at once on what the nomination meant. Not in terms of how she was favoured publicly: with committees on all questions—and what was not in question now?—there was surely a desperate search for people even marginally qualified to deliberate them.

  Ben looked at her with admiration, seeing the light of others playing upon her and taking pride in it. He chided her hesitation. —You don’t refuse an honour! And you damn well deserve it. Your qualification as a lawyer is as good as any of the others— better. None of them has your experience. What do they know about rural communities and squatter camps, all those constituencies to be considered?—

  They had met for lunch at his suggestion, the new development providing the occasion to take up again what once had been a means of seeing one another during the separation of the working day. She went on picking olives out of her salad. He watched her. —You’re not thinking of turning it down, are you, Vera.— She did not know what she was waiting for him to say, what it was she wanted from him. When the coffee came she sat over her cup, dragging the skin of her cheekbones under her fingers towards the temples. All she received from Ben was distress at her indecision, and her apparent lack of ability to explain it. Then she had to get back to the office; there was the awkward fact that he was in no hurry, unfortunately his business was doing poorly and there was no urgency or incentive to cut short the distraction of lunch. She touched his hand in acknowledgement and left, not looking back at him sitting there, alone.

  She sat at her desk gazing at the door so familiar she no longer saw it, following the gauze of an after-image, the old entry of Oupa with his papers for her and his plastic tray of curried chicken and pap. If he was no longer there, neither was she. When did she first start suddenly seeing a familiar scene (bedroom at night, the level of a glass of water, the abandoned clothes) as if she were describing to herself something already past? It was when she had beside her in One-Twenty-One, so real, a young lover. The Hitler Baby. Long ago as that. Her sense of her existence was as if she had entered someone’s house and seen a letter she had written, addressed in her own hand, lying there, delivered and as yet unopened: the impulse to gather it up, gather it in.

  One by one her colleagues finished the day’s work and left the offices. She could hear the cleaner emptying paper baskets with a slap on the base accompanied by singing in the strange soprano, almost atonal, of black women, the Greek chorus to their lives. They passed one another in the corridor on Vera’s way out, Vera prompted to come up on cue with the usual enquiry for Bella’s amour propre, how was the Dobsonville Ladies’ Choir doing in competitions lately, and Bella responding with the appreciation expected of her in return —Oh very good, very good, just won second place.

  The lopsided Stop sign at a crossroad, the splendid purple bougainvillaea espaliered on a wall, the fence where the black-and-white mask of a Husky was always pressed yearningly against the lattice, the place at which the elephant’s-foot roots buttressing a belhambra tree had raised the tarmac of the pavement like the bedclothes of a restless sleeper; the turn into a side street where these signals reached a destination. She picked up the evening paper at Zeph Rapulana’s mail-box and took it with her to the front door. Rang; stood there patiently. The silence of an empty house where his electric wall clock (a stickler, he says, no African time for him!) whirrs on the edge of audibility, and documents shift under the current of air from a fanlight left open. After a while she turned and went into the garden where a neat arrangement of two plastic chairs and a table was kept under the jacaranda. There she sat reading the paper. She did not find it difficult to give it her full attention. The dimension of awareness she had inhabited at the office had closed away. Vera was not even waiting for the owner of the haven she occupied to come to his home. If he had not, she would simply have stood up and left, when she was ready, refolding the paper and placing it carefully on the doorstep. But his car was heard slurring into the garage, and in a few moments he came through a side gate into the small garden claimed with palms and tree ferns he had brought from some ancestral home in the Lowveld that was not the Odensville squatter camp which for her was his place of origin.

  He smiled without sense of surprise, as if he always expected to find her there; or more likely because the African characteristic that rather exasperated her, in her house, of arriving at any time without a telephone call in respect for privacy, worked appealingly in reverse, where in African homes it was taken for granted that people walked in whenever they wished. He wore one of his Drommedaris suits, an elegant grey, but they exchanged the usual bobbing embrace of greeting appropriated by the liberation movement from the dictators. He took off the jacket and settled down in shirt-sleeves.

  —It’s an honour.— She tried it out on him.

  —Oh certainly.—

  —But is an honour the most useful. For me.—

  —Now what are you thinking of, Vera?—

  —Aren’t I better off, isn’t it better for me to be doing my job at the Foundation—the work you know I do well, don’t I—than putting myself in the position of making terribly important decisions, conditions for other people—the whole country. Putting myself way up there, above them—

  —Isn’t an honour as useful as you can make it? You know you always remind me I’m not against what people think of as honours. Some of our people even think of going to a board meeting as an honour, but you and I know it as something else. What did you once say?—infiltration.—

  —But this’s different. It’s setting oneself up to decide power, in the end. What’s a constitution but the practice, in law, of a Bill of Rights? The practical means of achieving all our fine phrases, The People Shall Have …—

  —It’s only the draft you’ll be dealing with. Something for the transitional council. It’s not final, all-out responsibility our grandchildren will blame you for.—

  —Ah but it’s the draft that will have to reconcile everything, so that the final constitution will have coherence, at leas
t, to go on. Think of regions, alone; the passions of disagreement over regions, everyone with his own home-drawn map and the powers he wants there. The Odendaals, the Buthelezis and Mangopes all shouting and stamping their feet for the right to do what they like with the people in this part of the country or that, no power of interference from a central government.—

  —But that’s exactly where the last battle’s going to be fought! There where the Committee sits! That’s the last gasp of the old regime, we’ll hear it there! There’s this one breath left in it. Go for it!—

  She swayed uncertainly, half-smiling; his usual manner was not vehement.

  The schoolmaster in him spoke as if he were back in his rural office and had called her in. —It’s your duty.

  — But she couldn’t see herself as self-righteous.

  —All right. It’s power. And power scares you.—

  —I don’t know.— She feels vaguely aggressive. —Yes it … I’m not like you: I’ve belonged so long to a people who used it horribly. I distrust it.—

  —For yourself. But if this Committee does the job, it’ll mean real empowerment for our people.—

  It was accepted tacitly that when he spoke of ‘our’ people it was as a black speaking for blacks, subtly different from when he used ‘we’ or ‘us’ and this meant an empathy between him and her. They continued to accept one another for exactly what they were, no sense of one intruding upon the private territory behind the other. It had come to her that this was the basis that ought to have existed between a man and a woman in general, where it was a question not of a difference of ancestry but of sex.

  —It’s a matter of degree, whether I sit on boards or you get to be part of the Committee—that’s something more urgent. You’ve never shown any doubts about where I sit.—

  —Ah no. Who could have anything to say about that. You’re making a place for blacks in the money world. Even the ex-Stalinists among us want it. There’s no millennium; only the IMF and the World Bank—

  —There are plenty who do say! I’m in it for the directors’ fees. I’m living in the Northern Suburbs instead of Alex or Soweto.— He was smiling at her certainty.

  She had teased him about that fancy restaurant. She released her tongue sharply against her palate and jerked her head in dismissal of herself and his detractors. To believe in him was to accept that the Left, as expressed in the living conditions of the majority rather than in ideology, can find its solutions to those conditions by using some of the means of capitalism. Looking at the neighbouring countries of the continent, what other solution was there to try, for the present?

  —So I should set myself up there among the little gods who are deciding what the country will be. Proportional representation, regions … And what about the Foundation? I’d be away for months, you know. We’re always short-staffed. There’s going to be so much work, things hotting up before a new government comes. People fear the old boundaries will stick unless you can get back to your land first. Places on the borders of homelands that are resisting incorporation with the rest of the country— we need successful court action to claim them quickly, and you know what a wrangle that can be. Problems like Zevenfontein —who, black or white, wants those poor people squatting next to them in a middle-class suburb? And Matiwane’s Kop, Thembalihle, Cornfields—they want their land back. Yesterday I was in Pretoria—again—the Advisory Commission on Land Allocation—

  —The old battlefield.—

  —Mogopa this time. A hearing we’d prepared for the Mogopa delegation. You know what one of them said to the Commission? ‘The Government is a thief who’s been caught but returned only half he’s stolen.’ The application we’d made for the restoration of those two farms taken from them in the mid-Eighties has resulted in them getting back only one, and it’s Swartrand, the one with less arable land. So we’re contesting. The man burst through our legal jargon like a paper hoop. ‘Now that the land is supposed to be given back to us, there are a lot of talks, talks … the Government is having the power to steal people’s property and afterwards set up commissions.’ And there was one old man, Abram Mabidikama, I can’t get him out of my mind—he said that watching white farmers graze their cattle on Hartebeeslaagte was like watching an abducted child labour for someone else’s profit, ‘while I have nothing’. And then he stood there and he told them, we are going to struggle to get our land back ‘up to the end of time’.—

  Zeph echoed quietly, for himself and them. —To the end of time.—

  The old man hadn’t said what rally crowds were chanting, kill the Boer, kill the farmer; but like Odendaal when this man sitting opposite her in his cuff-linked shirt-sleeves had said Meneer, we won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children, the Commission fingered their pens, hid behind their bifocals from the menace as Odendaal did behind his slammed door.

  —What piece of paper that’s going to be disputed by the gang of the white Right and homeland leaders is more important than the chance to make sure, now, people have somewhere finally to arrive, for god’s sake—to end being chased from nothing to nowhere. At least I know I can do something about that. Someone else can sit on the Committee? It’s easier than to replace me at the Foundation.—

  —Many things seem not to make sense because we’re rushing ahead, we have to, and this gets pushed aside for that, gets knocked over so something bigger can go forward.—

  —But nothing measures up.—

  —No. We have to leave the old standards of comparison, what’s important and what’s not. We’re not just weighing a bag of salt against a bag of mealies, Vera.—

  —I’m supposed to sit quietly on an electoral committee while down the road someone watches Sally and Didy’s house, waiting the chance to kill her.—

  —Have you seen her?—

  —I took a bunch of flowers, and that was all wrong—as if she were sick, or the way we do when someone’s died. She took them from me with a peculiar expression.—

  —You should go often. When something is threatening people need to have others coming round. I’ve known that in my life.—

  —She and Didy won’t come to our house. It is as if it were a disease. Or a curse. They don’t want to involve anyone else in the risk. Sally’s all bravado, of course, says you never know whether the man knows how to shoot straight, he might hit someone else by mistake.—

  The sun had set and the underlit sky was pearly with cloud. She stood up and stretched towards it. They walked together to his gate, sharing the end of the day without domesticity, he did not ask what she was going to do, she gave him no decision. He twisted a yellow rose absently off the bush beside the gate; and then handed it to her. She rolled the stem in her fingers.

  —Mind the thorns.—

  —Empowerment, Zeph. What is this new thing? What happened to what we used to call justice?—

  Chapter 25

  Didymus accompanies Sibongile everywhere with a gun in the inner pocket of his jacket. On his political record he never would have been granted a licence to carry a firearm had he applied for it; the Movement supplied one, asserting its own form of legality. Not only the State, but those factions within it but out of its control, rebelling at the State’s even reluctant concessions over power, had the whole arsenal of army and police force to seize upon. What were a few caches of smuggled arms— symbolized by the AK-47, mimed, chanted, mythologized— against that? When police protection is blandly offered, behind it is this reality: the bodyguard itself may include in its personnel an assassin. To have that one patrolling the street outside the house, the first home back home, where Didymus and Sibongile and their daughter are eating the evening meal, to have that one sitting behind her head as she drives into the city!

  Sibongile looks at the thing, the gun, with distaste, and constantly asks Didymus if he’s sure the safety catch is on, there against his body. But he is no white suburban husband, needing to be instructed how to ‘handle’ a gun—as the professional-sounding phrase used by amateu
rs as a euphemism for learning how to kill, goes. And he will not, he assures, hit anyone by hazard, the wrong one.

  And they both know that if the hit-man acts it will not be while presenting a target. It will be, as it has been for others, a spread of bullets from a passing car, or through a window where she and her husband and daughter sit at table. Didymus will not have time to see a target or fire. The gun is a pledge that has little chance of being honoured. Didymus has long been accustomed to heavy odds in his way of life and all he can do is lead Sibongile through them.

  Suspicious-looking individuals hang around the house but they are only journalists; the assassins will not arouse suspicion, or if they do, it will be after the event, as when neighbours remembered that a red car circled the block a few days before the last assassination. Failing to get to the prospective victim or her husband, journalists manage to waylay Mpho, who is quite flattered to be asked how she feels about her mother being under threat, and appears in a charming photograph which she cuts out of the newspaper and puts up in her room. The distraction makes her feel less afraid.

  No one can say when again it will be safe. Safe to do what? Move about freely. Leave the gun at home. At the Negotiating Council sessions Sibongile and others on the hit-list are at least conveniently gathered in one place. Young men from the liberation army are on guard; grown plump and relaxed after the austerities of years in bush camps, they stand close among themselves, like schoolboys at lunch break, when their share of the refreshments provided for delegates is handed out to them. To be accustomed to precautions may be exactly what the hit-men are waiting to happen to their targets. Any routine, even that of watchfulness itself, becomes absent-minded: once you get used to being at risk that is when you are most at risk. That is when the opportunity arises for you to be taken in a way not foreseen. A surprise. Those singled out on the hit-list remind each other: go out to the corner shop for a newspaper on a quiet public holiday morning, there’s nobody about so early, it’s not a movement habitual to you that anyone could predict, just to the corner, that’s all, and when you come back you get a bullet through the head, not once but three times, to make sure. The last surprise of your life.