My Son's Story

by Nadine Gordimer

  The faces they draw over their faces, the big down-turned mouth and the little vertical points below and above the middle of each eye, that suggest shed tears. When he sat opposite me at supper that first night what face did he see on me. What face did he make me wear, from then on, to conceal him, what he was doing—my knowledge of it—from us: my mother, my sister, myself.

  Perhaps if we had never left our area outside the small town it would never have happened? We should never have been there, at that cinema. She would never have found him, us—his blonde woman. I’ve thought of all the things that would have had to be avoided if I were not to have met my father at that cinema on an afternoon before the exams. I’ve lived them over in my mind because I did not know how to live now that I had met him, now that I had seen, not the movie I bunked swotting for, but what our own life is.

  Although he worked in the city we had gone on living in our little house on the Reef for a time. My parents were paying off monthly instalments against the municipal loan with which they had bought it; my mother had her job running the crèche, for which eventually there had been granted a municipal subsidy by the town councillors. So we stayed where we were. Except for him, everything was in its place. The swing he had put up in the back yard when we were little, the kennel I’d helped him build for our Mickey, the dog he’d taken me to choose at the SPCA. While he was away with his committees and meetings at weekends my mother tried to do with us the things we all used to do together. And the last Sunday picnic before we left our home was in the winter. The last time; the end of winter. The veld had been fired to let the new growth come through, the sun burned off the night’s frost, vaporized as a cool zest on the smell of ashes. A black landscape with only our mountains, the mine-dumps, yellow in the shadowless light. My mother spread a sheet of plastic under our rug over the sharp black stubble that puffed like smoke under our feet and dirtied our socks. There were the things we liked to eat, naartjies whose brilliant orange skins Baby arranged in flower patterns on the blackness. Did he say, my daughter’s going to be an artist? Because he was there. At that last picnic we had on our old patch of veld between the dumps, he was with us. He and I rambled off, I poking with a stick at every mound and hole for what treasures I did not know, and he showed me some, he discovered them for me; he always did. There was the skeleton of a fledgling caught by the fire, and he said we could take it home and wire it together. Then he spied for me the cast of a songololo thick as my middle finger, I held it up and could see the sky through it at the end of its tiny tunnel. Ice-blue sky, yellow dumps, black veld, like the primary colours of a flag. Our burnt-out picnic. She would never have known where to find us, there.

  But when she came to the house in Johannesburg she had already found him. On her errands of mercy and justice she had visited the prison.

  The ex-schoolteacher and his wife discussed the decision as they always had done everything, before they left the Reef town. They talked over months, as people who are very close to one another do, while carrying on the routine, whether of tasks or rest, that is the context of their common being. He was replacing the element in the kettle and she was cutting up vegetables for one of her delicious cheap dishes; she was in the bath and he came in and took up what he had been saying after Baby and Will had gone to bed; he and his wife were themselves in bed, had said goodnight and turned away, then slowly talk began again.

  It was the biggest decision of their lives so far. Marriage? Love had led them so gently into that. To leave the place where they had courted, where the children had been born, where everybody knew them, knew she was Sonny’s wife, Baby and Will were Sonny’s children. Aila’s silences said things like this.

  —But what is this house? A hovel you’ve slaved away to make into something decent. How much longer can we have Baby sharing a room with her brother—she’s a big girl, now. Paying the town council interest for another twenty-five years, thirty years, the never-never, we can’t even give our kids a little room each. We don’t have a vote for their council but they take our money for the privilege of living in this ghetto.—He had never before used this term to her, for their home. A changing vocabulary was accompanying the transformation of Sonny to ‘Sonny’ the political personality defined by a middle, nickname. She knew he was leading her into a different life, patiently, step by step neither he nor she was sure she could follow. Her spoken contribution to their discussions was mostly questions. —But we won’t find anything much better where we’re going, will we? Where are we going to live?—None knew more than a member of the committee against removals about the shortage of shelter for people of their kind, decades– generations-long. ‘Housing’ meant finding a curtained-off portion of a room, a garage, a tin lean-to. Then there was the matter of her job. Where would she find work in Johannesburg? Her kind of work. —I suppose I could do something else …get taken on in a factory.—Aila was referring to his connections with the clothing industry, he knew; it alarmed him. Unthinkable that through him Aila should sit bent over a machine. Jostle with factory girls in the street. He would find some solution, he would not show his alarm. Suddenly he saw exactly, precisely what she was doing, before him, at that moment: slicing green beans diagonally into sections of the same length, cutting yellow and red bell peppers into slivers of identical thickness, all perishable, all beautiful as a mosaic. Aila’s hands were not coarsened and dried by the housework she did; she went to bed with him every night with them creamed and in cotton gloves. The momentary distraction was not a distraction but a focus that thrust him, face down, in to the organic order and aesthetic discipline of Aila’s life, that he was uprooting.

  She sat in the bath soaping her neck. Her hair was piled up and tied out of the way in the old purple scarf that had its place on a hook among towels. He was already drawing breath to speak when he came through the door.—Why should you be ‘grateful’ for the measly subsidy they give so you can run a crèche for them.—

  —Not for them, for the children.—

  —Ah no, no, for them. So they can sit in their council chamber and congratulate themselves on ‘upgrading’ living conditions in the ghetto where our kids are brought up. Where we’re supposed to live and die. The place where they confine us. Zoo. Leper colony. Asylum. It’s humiliating to take from them, Aila. Let them have it.—

  Her questions were never objections; they were the practical consequence of acceptance. She did not oppose the move. She was careful to present it to their children as something exciting and desirable. And the children were ready to quit with heartlessness their friends, their school, the four walls and small yard where they had played. Baby had the teenager’s longing for the life she imagined existed in the city; Will cared only about taking the dog along. To Johannesburg, Johannesburg! Nobody asked exactly where. The husband, the father, was taking care of that.

  When he knew where they were going to live the slither of the commuter train over the rails, taking him home from the warehouse, raced his bravado excitement, but as he walked the familiar streets each night, back to the old house, through the greasy paper litter outside the fish and chips shop, past the liquor store with its iron bars and attendant drunk beggars, past the funeral parlour where the great shining black car stood always ready to take the poor grandly on a last ride, past his old school with its broken windows and the graffiti of freedom that still had not come—as he deserted this, he realized that a certain shelter was being given up, for the family. Shabby, degrading shelter—but nevertheless. He himself had the strength of a mission to arm him; his family—Aila—it would be different for them. So he calmed his euphoria before he told her. And it was not in front of the children.

  —We’re going to move in among whites. It’s a tactic decided upon, and I’m one who’s volunteered. If you agree.—

  She smiled indulgently, disbelieving. The committee had debated many tactics of resistance that did not come to anything. —What are you talking about. Tell me. How?—

  —It’s been don
e already. It’ll be in one of the southern suburbs, of course, not where well-off whites live. Working-class Afrikaners want to move up in the world and they’ll sell for a high price.—

  —We can’t afford to buy anything! In Johannesburg! Where will we get the money?—

  —The money’s being put up for us. We’ll pay off a rent, same as we do here.—

  —But it’s illegal, how can you own a house in a white place?—

  —That’s the idea. We don’t accept their segregation, we’ve had enough of telling them, we’re showing them.—

  —Us?—A pause.—So that’s the idea.—

  It was the nearest she came to challenging a committee’s presumption in directing her family’s life.

  —It’s a really nice house. Three bedrooms, a sitting-room, another room we can use for your sewing and my books—imagine! I’ll be able to have a desk. We’ll do up the kitchen, I’ll build you a breakfast nook. And there’s a big yard. A huge old apricot tree. Will can make a tree-house.—

  Aila was inclining her head at each feature, as if marking off a list. She stopped when he did, looking at him with her black liquid gaze, appreciatively. Aila understood everything, even the things he didn’t intend to bring up all at once; he could keep nothing from her, her quiet absorbed his subsumed half-thoughts, hesitations, disguising or dissembling facial expressions, and fitted together the missing sense. Because she said little herself, she did not depend on words for the supply of information from others. It was as if she had been there when he had been walking home from the station through the dreary streets and he had spoken aloud about their degradation as also some kind of shelter. Aila said:—Afrikaner neighbours.—

  —Oh kids quickly get together. Dirty knees all look the same colour, hey. He’ll make friends. The parents will avoid us …if we’re lucky, that’s all they’ll do. But then we don’t need them.—

  —No.—

  A single word had weight, from her. The subdued monosyllable was pronounced with such certainty; the habit of each other had made them even less demonstrative than they had been at the beginning of their marriage, but he was moved to go over to her. She turned away to some task. Awkwardly—she touched him only in the dark, in bed—she put up a hand to rest a moment on the nape of his neck. The spicy-sweet steam of Friar’s Balsam came from the jam jar into which she had poured boiling water.—Who’s that for?—

  —Will’s got a chest cold.—

  —I’ll take it to him. Is he in bed?—

  He went off to tell his son about the tree-house they were going to build together. At their new home, high up, leaving the ghetto behind.

  I don’t understand how Baby doesn’t know. Of course the fact that my father is away at all hours and sometimes for several days in itself doesn’t mean anything. Long before he went to prison he had to get used to leaving us alone a lot. We had to get used to it. He wasn’t a schoolteacher anymore, home every evening. He hasn’t worked in the warehouse since the end of the first year in Johannesburg because the committee needed him as a full-time organizer. And then the committee made alliances with the new black trade unions which had just been allowed to be formed, and I don’t know what else. All sorts of other people; groups active against the government. He was always one of those who wanted unity among them, always talking about it. When he was at home there were meetings sometimes the whole of Sunday, blacks, and our kind—lucky this house was built as a white people’s house and there was room for them to shut themselves away.

  And as soon as he came out of prison it started again—my father isn’t the man to be scared off his political work because he’s been jailed for it. Or he wasn’t the man; now I don’t know what he is. He goes out, away, and when he comes back, walks in, does the things he used to (pouring himself a glass of iced water from the fridge, hanging keys on one of the hooks he put up when we first moved here, asking us what sort of day we’ve had) he is acting. Performing what he used to be. Can’t my sister feel that? It isn’t something to see—the point is, it all looks the same, sounds the same. But the feeling. The body inside his same clothes. Whatever he touches, it’s with the hand that has just left her. He smells different. Can’t my sister smell it? Not of scent or anything, it’s not that. I suppose he’d surely be too ashamed, he’s become too sly for that. His own smell—of his skin—that I remember from when I was little and he’d cuddle me, or that used to be there until quite lately, when we’d share the bathroom. It’s gone. I wouldn’t recognize him in the dark.

  Why should I be the one who had to know. Is it supposed to be some kind of a privilege? (What does he think!) She’s older than I am, why should she be running around happily with her boy-friends, going off to her commercial college with silver-painted nails and Freedom T-shirts, secretly smoking pot every day.

  I want to tell her, so she’ll know what it’s like to know. Why shouldn’t she. I’ve tried. I said to her, he’s different since he’s out of prison—I mean, do you think Dad’s all right? She laughed, impatient with me. She’s always in a hurry.—All right! Who wouldn’t be feeling good to get out! D’you expect him to be moping around like you?—

  And of course she doesn’t have anything to do with his body, any more, she’s touching boys. My mother doesn’t know about her either. I’m the only one.

  Another thing he used to do, like going straight to the fridge for a glass of water, he used to call, Aila? Aila? if she wasn’t in the first room he entered. He doesn’t do that. If she’s busy in another room he’s sometimes home for half an hour or so before she knows he’s there. In her innocence she takes this as one of the benefits we’ve won for ourselves, for the cause, for freedom: this house has privacy, it’s not like the old one in the ghetto where we were together all the time. It’s a space he deserves. It’s something we have to be grateful to him for. He’s been to prison for principles like this. When they came and took him away she kept looking around where she stood, as if a cleaver had come down as I’d seen it split a sheep carcass when she sent me to the butcher, lopping away a part of her she couldn’t feel, yet. I went and took her hand but mine wasn’t what was lost. I think they’d always been together in everything, she couldn’t believe he was going off calmly (as he did) to an experience neither could ever have imagined would happen to them when they were young. (She was only eighteen when they married, just about the same age as my sister is now.) All the times away at meetings hadn’t prepared her for this; from those he had always come home and called, Aila. And then he came out of prison with an experience she hadn’t gone through with him, the way I suppose they’d had us—the children—together, and made the move to Johannesburg, and taught Baby and me to be polite but not to be afraid of the whites living in the same street because to be afraid was to accept that we didn’t have the right to live there. It isn’t exactly that my mother seems to want to find a way to make up, to him, for the unimaginable experience he has had on his own. (Visiting someone in prison you only have them shown to you for a few minutes, Baby and I went with her sometimes and he had been taken out of his cell, we never saw it, he talked through glass.) It’s more that having been in prison for the cause of freedom has made him someone elect, not to be followed in his private thoughts by ordinary people. Like herself. Like us. She once told Baby and me she remembered, when she was very small, her grandfather looking so different, wearing a white turban when he returned from Mecca, that she ran away and hid.

  What I’d like to know is does prison give my father the freedom to do what he’s doing. Is it all right so long as she doesn’t know. That is what he was getting me to agree to when he made me look at him across the table that night after the cinema. But it works both ways. I can play hooky whenever I like; he can’t ask where I’m going, where I’ve been. Because I know where he’s going, where he’s been. He can’t order me, during the holidays, to finish reading the set-works for next term. He sees me with Sportsday, under his nose, instead of King Lear that he can quote reams of. An
ungrateful child is sharper than a serpent’s tooth. I don’t want to be in the know with him. I don’t want to ask him for anything … in case he can’t refuse. I’ll bet I could bring up the question of a motorbike again now, and maybe I’d get it.