None to Accompany Me

by Nadine Gordimer

  —For Christ’s sake, why do you do this?—

  Vera was looking with incomprehension at something else before her, the baby back at the breast of a woman who wouldn’t have a man. —Because I cannot live with someone who can’t live without me.—

  —That’s right. Answer in riddles.—

  —When someone gives you so much power over himself he makes you a tyrant.—

  A few tears fell on the baby’s spongy filaments, glistening there, Annie brushed off the contamination fiercely. —Like the penis business. You and the penis, I couldn’t understand that, either, could I.—

  Vera wanted to bow her head, walk indoors hangdog, and despised herself for it. Always she had had a masochistic need to be chastised by Annie in expiation of the times when, loving her, she had neglected her by having her out of mind, that most callous form of neglect; while caring for nothing but making love in One-Twenty-One Delville Wood. She resisted the need by coldness. —By now we ought to have accepted there are things about each other neither of us understands.—

  Above the head of the baby Annie screwed up the left side of her face as if to focus better, ward off. —And what are you going to do?—

  —When the Committee’s finished, I’ll be back at the Foundation of course.—

  —You know I don’t mean that. Where’re you intending to live? You’re not going to buy another house, are you? A flat? I can’t see you in one of those buildings where you have to sign in and out every time with some security thug in the foyer.—

  —I’m moving to the annexe of Zeph’s house.—

  No recognition of the name.

  —Zeph Rapulana. You know him. He was at the party we gave when you and Lou were staying with us.—

  —When my grandfather died.— A reproof asserting the order of events in better proportion to their significance.

  —I think you and Lou talked to him for a while, in the garden that night.—

  —The man who sits on boards and is a director of banks and whatnot, you told us? The smooth-talking representative of the new middle class?—

  —The squatter camp leader I’ve known for a long time. A good friend.—

  Annie was looking at her in sour derisory disbelief. —You’ve always dominated in your own house. You’re going to share with someone, now? Why?—

  —It’s an annexe. Quite separate, own entrance and so on. There’s no question of any intrusion, either way. We respect each other.—

  —But how did this decision come about? Not out of thin air! Not because you answered an offer of accommodation in the newspaper!—

  —We talked about it together.—

  —So you’re such great friends.— No reaction: something else Annie sees she is not expected to understand. —And how will you get on with his family. The wife? D’you at least know her? All very well your professional friendships, Vera—

  —She lives in the house he built in an area the Foundation fought a successful action over. She doesn’t like the city; the children are all away, grown-up—like mine.—

  Annie’s body began to rock gently back and forth, soothing the baby to sleep, and, as if with the movement, her sense of her mother changed, she felt that her mother needed protection from herself—her headstrong naivety. —Ma, so you’re virtually moving in with a man. What will people think?—

  From Annie! Vera laughed. What a consideration, from a lesbian, a lesbian parent—Annie! —D’you mean a black man, then?—

  —I mean just what I said: my father’s gone to live in London, you move in with another man.—

  —I don’t think anyone could think anything about someone my age, and a man.—

  Vera had her palms raised in a steeple against her mouth in her familiar attitude of obduracy. Annie seemed to have to capture her attention against the fascination with which she was following the darting ballet of the squirrel approaching and retreating near the verandah.

  —Ma, you’re wrong. They’ll think.— She continued to rock, in embarrassment at what she was about to deliver. —And they’ll laugh at you.—

  Vera was deeply curious rather than hurt in some residual sexual vanity. —Do you think so? That’s interesting.—

  And this roused Annie’s curiosity, or wonder. —What are you experimenting with?—

  —Not experimenting.— Vera kindly, but to the point. —You’re the one who’s doing that.—

  —We’re doing what we know we want, Lou and I. Simple. I don’t know what it is you think you want. Still. Oh I know— your work, what’s coming for the country—but you? What have you wanted?—

  Only someone young could ask this as the single question. Yet she was forced into response. —Now. To find out about my life. The truth. In the end. That’s all.—

  —Oh Vera!— A gesture with a hand free of the baby, flourishing the size, the presumption of the answer. —And have you?—

  —I’m getting there.—

  —‘The truth about your life.’ But that’s not the question. Was it worth it?—

  —What?—

  —Everything. All that you made happen. The way you’re suddenly making something else happen now.—

  —But that’s not the question. It’s not a summing-up. It’s not (Vera has the expression of someone quoting) a bag of salt weighed against a bag of mealies.—

  —And so? You’re not obliged to answer because I’m your daughter. I’m not looking for a guiding light …—

  But a key opening a door they had looked for entry to only once before, they were in some place of confidence.

  Vera searched there for something partially, tentatively explanatory that would not make some homely philosophy of a process that must not be looked back upon with the glance of Orpheus. —Working through—what shall I say—dependencies.—

  —What a strange way to see life. Yours, or others on you?— But the sound of Lou’s third-hand Karmann-Ghia (relic of the days when she was a carefree bachelor, so to speak) braking at the gate made Annie forget about an answer. Lou was coming with a smiling here-am-I stride up the path. A cancelled appointment had given her the chance to slip home for lunch—she brought it with her, a hot loaf and a tray of avocados. She dumped these and kissed Annie, was kissed back while she caressed Annie’s nape and both hung over the padded basket where their baby slept.

  Home.

  Vera is the onlooker to domestic serenity.

  Somehow, she and Annie have exchanged places. She has left home, and Annie is making home of a new kind entirely.

  Chapter 28

  Perhaps the passing away of the old regime makes the abandonment of an old personal life also possible.

  I’m getting there.

  Proposals to the Technical Committee on Constitutional Issues come from all groups and formations. And the groupings scarcely can be defined with any accuracy from week to week. Wild alliances clot suddenly in the political bloodstream, are announced, break up, flow in and out of negotiations. Everyone wants their own future arranged around thein, everyone has plans for a structure of laws to contain their ideal existence. It is the nearest humans will ever get to the myth of being God on Creation Day. Vera Stark and her colleagues sit week after week, sometimes into the night, considering the basis of proportional representation, parties qualifying with five per cent or ten per cent, consensus in Cabinet decisions or on the vote of a two-thirds majority; the percentage by which the President should be elected, the percentage by which amendments to the constitution could be made, the percentage by which the Bill of Rights could be amended, the extent of powers and duties to be assigned to regional legislatures. And on and on. The principle of each proposal is almost without exception the same: every cluster or assembly of individuals wants to protect itself from the power of others. The fallible human beings on the Committee are occupied with the task of finding a way through this that would protect all these without danger or disadvantage to any. Politics began outside the Garden; the violent brotherhood of Cain and Abel can
be transformed into the other proclaimed brotherhood only if it is possible to devise laws to bring this about.

  Zeph found her in the garden where a place seemed to have been ready for her for some time. He had dinners and evening meetings and she often was in late session with the Committee, so they seldom coincided on working days. But on Sundays they were there. Vera had pensioned off her three-times-a-week maid with her house, but Zeph had an old woman brought in from the country, perhaps a relative, to whom he referred as his ‘housekeeper’ since it was delicate for blacks to admit to employing servants. The woman went to the allday open-air gathering of some religious sect on Sundays, as Zeph went to early service in an Anglican church: Vera cooked breakfast and set it out under the jacaranda mid-morning. He was used to being waited on by women but did not expect it of her, always thanked her as if it were a surprise, and carried the dishes with her back to her small kitchen when they had eaten. They read the papers, passing particular pages to one another without comment; each, out of their particular activities and connections, had knowledge to exchange in private of what was omitted there, not for publication. —No one’ll trust we’re impartial, whatever we put forward to the negotiations, every day when I get to that chair where I sit I have to remind myself of this. And perhaps they’re right? I know, for myself— I’m influenced by the land, at the back of my mind I’m seeing every possible check and balance in terms of how it might affect the question of land distribution. It comes from all my time at the Foundation, it’s been the perspective of my life for so long.—

  —I don’t think everyone thinks the Committee isn’t impartial. I wouldn’t say that, Vera. Just a few who don’t understand what impartiality tries for, because preventing ‘abuse of power’ only means to them they haven’t a hope in hell of succeeding with their own kind of domination.—

  —But that’s just the problem. You and I, here, we can see those people for what they are, and dismiss them. We know what they are, we’ve decided they’re a dangerous hindrance. But the Committee has to consider all submissions, has to take every one seriously, there we have to correct in each other any personal judgments. Remember I once said to you, a constitution’s the practice in law of a Bill of Rights? Well I’ve found impartiality really means listening to the most obvious contrivances thought up by people who don’t care what they’d do to claim legality to hang on to power, finagle power. The use to which they’ll put beautiful legal formulations! We’re caught up in a jungle of our own negotialionspeak.—

  —‘Technical Committee’ … yes … sounds so simple … Like knowing how to wire up some lights or keep the airconditioners going … They could have called it something else. But that’s a hangover from all the names we had, nothing to do with the circumstances we were supposed to believe were described by the names—remember Separate but Equal, Extension of Universities Act, Immorality Act, whatnot … It’s a habit we took over.—

  They laughed, matching alone together in the winter sun many of the curious aspects of the changes of which they were part, the time through which they were moving.

  If she was grappling in difficulty with what were supposed to be the technicalities of people’s future lives, he had no such officially defined euphemism to protect him. There were scandals in the financial enterprise of empowerment. His face appeared among others in the newspapers they opened. A tangle of loans, debts, transfer of funds from one company to another, and accusations of these being fronts for the Movement. —So are they going to ask you to write into the constitution that no one in a political party can have business interests? That’s something, after the way big business and the mines kept the old regime in place since our grandfathers’ days!—

  —How did it happen? Is there really embezzlement somewhere, people you thought you could trust?—

  —I don’t like to think so, straight off. We have to sort it all out. It began to get too big too quickly, out of hand. Some sectors—I told you when the figures came out last month how well the insurance company’s investment in housing is going?— they’re doing well, but the papers don’t make much of it. Blacks can’t succeed. They mustn’t. The old story.—

  —Wish-fulfilment rumours. But the figures they quote?—

  —I wish it was just rumours. Other things are shaky. We haven’t kept strict enough control! … when we’ve seen some of our brothers heading for trouble we’ve baled them out on their assurance it was temporary, we believed them, they believed it themselves! We haven’t learned yet to be ruthless, and that’s the first rule in business, make no mistake; we did.— There came to him the jargon that had entered his vocabulary from the Drommedaris. —Not a question of anyone’s hand in the till. I’m prepared to stick by that. It’ll be a terrible thing for me, Vera, if it is.—

  Her eyes moved in resentful alarm. —You wouldn’t be involved directly.—

  —No.— His hand blotted the photographs spread across three columns. —But I’d be seen, for good, as being among those who were.—

  She took an orange and separated its sections. He was looking at her indulgently, carefully, from the very limit of trust between them, testing if he could even accept, from her, that she might think him capable of theft—for which ‘unacceptable practice’ was simply the Drommedaris name in the world where he risked himself now.

  —What would my tenant do? Move out?—

  She dropped pips from her lips to her cupped hand and looked down as she ate, as if all she had to do to find the answer was finish a mouthful. —I’d know it’s sometimes necessary to do things now we wouldn’t do in another time. That it was done for a reason, someone, something else.—

  He smiled. —Ah no. Be careful. We have to make a lot of new rules but that’s not one. A thief is a thief, Vera. You and I cannot be exceptions.—

  —You’d be offending God, wouldn’t you. Yes. But Zeph I’m not so sure about myself; that consideration not coming into it for me. I might decide money would achieve more for the people, in one place rather than another. I might cross funds … A good thing I don’t sit on your Boards.—

  —Well if you did, at least you couldn’t be accused of being predictable. Black.—

  The scandal died down; or was averted by reorganization. Zeph had many discussions with business colleagues at his house. Of course she was not present, kept to her annexe. Sometimes he talked to her later as a consequence rather than a direct account of these discussions. —Can you imagine, there’s the example of a factory that regularly produces nearly double the amount of each order because the workmanship is so sloppy, there are so many items that come out not up to standard that only half the number can be used to fill the order. The waste! The cost! In money, in man-hours! Low productivity can sabotage completely our hopes of raising living standards in the long run. Our talk all these years about redistribution of wealth and land—when we’ve done that with what was stockpiled for themselves by white regimes, we’ll still be unable to compete in world markets if we don’t raise productivity. We’re far behind successful countries, far behind Korea, Taiwan, China … countries with cheap labour. They produce better goods than we do and on a scale that makes our productivity chicken-feed. We’ve blamed exploited cheap labour and lack of skills training for our failure. And that’s been true, far as we could judge, because we’ve never had anything else but an exploited labour force. But when our workers are no longer exploited, will they produce more and better? What about the old ways? What are we counting on? That when you have black management, a black executive director, if in some cases the State you voted into power is your boss, you’ll put enthusiasm into your work? Motivation. I worry. It won’t be a form of protest against the white exploiter to be caught skimping on the job. No more fifty per cent rejects. We need black management that knows how to make people work.—

  Vera watched his face, his manner; smiled. —On board. No avoiding it.—

  If she happened to encounter his colleagues in passing he introduced her, hand on her sh
oulder: —My tenant.— If anyone showed curiosity about this tenant, the ageing white woman who lived on his property, he was pleased to have the opportunity to inform them —Mrs Stark is on the Technical Committee. She is one of the people drafting our constitution.—

  The tenant. The designation, for the public, suited her well. It was a kind of private play on words, between Zeph Rapulana and Mrs Stark, linking their present arrangement to Odensville, the matter of land, over which they had come to begin to know one another. It was a consequence in which there were loyalties but no dependencies, in which there was feeling caught in no recognized category, having no need to be questioned. On the home ground of the present—violent, bureaucratic, shaking, all at once, expressed in burnt and bloodied bodies, in a passion of refusal, revulsion against institutions, in the knowledge of betrayal by police and army supposed to protect, in the anger turned against itself, in the prolixity of documents—there manages to exist this small space in existence. Yet Vera felt it open, to be traversed by herself: herself a final form of company discovered. She was able to do her work on the Committee with total attention, she wrote letters filled with news of it regularly, addressed jointly to Ben and Ivan, she telephoned Annie to enquire after the progress of the baby, she visited the Maqomas and marked off in silent apprehension the passing of another week, another month that perhaps meant Sally, alone in her danger, would survive.

  Vera’s annexe was really too small for her to have visitors there; only Adam, on his motorbike, occasionally arrived at a weekend, and once took her with his girl-friend to hear a jazz group from what he thought must be her era, in a café crowded with young blacks and whites to whom the music was quaintly new.

  Perhaps he had had a request from Ben. Ben was reassured (guilty, somewhere unacknowledged in himself, at leaving her, even if this was for her reasons) that at least she was living on what must be the safest kind of premises, in present conditions, the property of a prominent black man not overtly involved in politics. But he worried about her way of life, apparently so completely involved, in public, always part of group thinking, group decision, and so withdrawn outside that. Ben searched for her in her letters without success. Ivan, just to satisfy him, suggested she might have taken up some mysticism or other, Sufi or something. No, no—how little could a child know of its own parent! Ben at least had gone far enough with her in her life to know that, wherever she was now, it was not a form of escape. He was diffident to explain to this being who was so much like her in the flesh (the face he addressed himself to made it seem to him it was her he was talking to) that she belonged to the reality back there as he himself never had, never could try to, except through her. Ivan occasionally wondered why it was apparently impossible for Ben to go back; but it was a bargain he made with himself that if he didn’t pry into the parents’ lives they wouldn’t pry into his own. He and this sometimes strange father were close on their own terms; there was no financial burden, he was making plenty of money; so long as he himself didn’t find a woman he really wanted to marry they could go on perfectly well living together in odd bachelordom. His colleagues rather admired him for his affection for this handsome ageing parent they encountered in the Holland Park house. Evidently he had been an artist of some kind. According to Ivan, he kept himself busy going round the exhibitions.