My Son's Story

by Nadine Gordimer

  It was Hannah who wrote to him: knew how to say everything in three, let alone five hundred words.

  He wrote and asked her to apply to the Commissioner of Prisons for a visit but she answered that she did not want to use up one of the quota of visits his family certainly needed.

  Needing Hannah.

  Oh Aila, Aila.

  Why did Aila never speak? Why did she never say what he wanted her to say?

  Family matters. He had never built the tree-house with Will and now the boy would be too old to be interested. Baby was being inducted into women’s things; between her and her mother. At least he had been able to provide Baby with a room of her own for the process of becoming a woman.

  Oh Aila, Aila.

  For I don’t know how long we believed my mother didn’t know. He and I. We were so clever; he made us such a good team, a comic team. What a buffoon he made of me, his son, backward, stumbling along behind, aping his lies. Poor Tom to his Lear (I should have told him that, sometime, it’s the sort of sign he’d appreciate that my education hasn’t been wasted). I don’t think he ever told direct lies, at least when I was around. When he went off to his woman he never said he was going to be somewhere else; he didn’t have to, my mother respected the fact that a man doing underground political work (his full-time clandestine occupation once he came out of prison) cannot reveal his movements without involving and endangering his family.

  The walls in what was meant to be a white man’s house aren’t like those in the house outside Benoni through which we couldn’t help hearing the neighbours’ quarrels and sexual groans. I don’t know what went on—how he managed, without me, when they were alone in their bedroom. Their bedroom with the bed-head that extended at right angles like elbows, on either side of the bed, into two small cabinets, each with a lamp for which she had made a shade, on her side the alarm clock and lemon hand-cream pot, on his an overspill of newspapers, torch, aspirins in an ashtray Baby made him when she was small, book he was currently reading. I can only imagine. Invent from what I knew of her, what I knew of what he’d become. What did he think of to say to her while he was untying the shoelaces he’d tied when he got out of bed with that woman. Perhaps when you’ve been married a long time it’s a shared burrow you scuttle along, every feature of it, for one, known by the other, every comment on the way anticipated by the other. The bedrooms, the nights, are like that. But he came and went by secret passages; he had things to say that he never could say. He must have had to watch every word.

  And not only words. Once when I got into the back seat of the car I saw something strange on the floor. Everything; anything, alerted me to danger. My mother was getting into the front seat beside him; I waited until we’d driven off and they were deciding whether or not it was necessary to go to the bank before filling up with petrol, and I was able to pick up the object without them noticing. It was the dried head of a sunflower. Just the hard disc from which the seeds had fallen. Exactly like a round honeycomb. I don’t know how it could have got there. Why. I only knew he would not be able to explain it to my mother; he did not need to explain anything to me, since the cinema, when he’d told me what to see and made clear what I was not to have seen.

  My mother seemed to me as she always had been. Only, because of what I was in with, with him, and so afraid of—for her—there seemed to be some kind of space around her that kept us off—him and me—and that I held my breath for fear of entering. I didn’t want to be in the room alone with her, either. But if I kept out of her way she would know there was something wrong, thinking in her innocence this would be something concerning me. And if I tried to be with her, to cover up that he wasn’t—that might set her thinking, and I didn’t want her to think, I didn’t want my mother to think about him in any other but her gentle, trusting way, changed from the old times on the Reef simply by the special respect and privacy she taught us, by her example, he had earned by the pilgrimage through prison.

  It’s only since Baby cut her wrists that I’ve known my mother knew about him all the time. Well, not at the beginning (and even I don’t know when exactly that was, whether the cinema was early on), but for a long time. She surely couldn’t have known when, some weeks after my father was released, she and the wives of two other men who had been in prison with him decided to give a little New Year party for them and their supporters. When she and my father made up their list of people to invite she suggested Hannah Plowman and he wrote the name without comment, as if that were just another guest. It surely would not have been like my mother to have included that woman out of some sort of guile, a test of my father’s reaction, of whether the woman herself would have the nerve to come to our house, now?

  What a thought to have about my mother. But when you are lying, in your presence at the table, in every expression on your face, in everything you customarily do, going in and out to school, fooling quite naturally over the telephone with friends, you can’t imagine anything that isn’t devious, anymore.

  The whole world is lying, fornicating and lying.

  I was at that party. Baby and I were there, first helping with the preparation of food and rearranging the furniture. Baby, carrying a gift of snacks, went with him to our neighbours to tell them there’d be music until late that night; from the day we moved in, my mother had established good if distant relations with these whites. They didn’t know about prison, about his political activities—one look at my mother and their Afrikaner fears that our skin meant dirty habits and noise they’d tolerate only from their own colour, were groundless. Everybody drank a lot—not my father, and my mother doesn’t drink at all—and Baby was over-made-up and amazed all those people with her wild dancing. She was good, but showing off to the men. I danced a few times, after a beer, but I could feel myself getting angry every time some tannie said I was growing up handsome as my father, and I could see him, his face painted with the sweat of his hospitality, shining pride. I don’t remember whether he danced with that woman. I can hardly picture her there at all. The moment when she arrived I was passing with a bottle of wine; it was the first time I’d seen her since the cinema and I’d thought about that face so much I could scarcely recognize it—this pink, scrubbed face, blonde hair springing back into shape like the coat of a wet dog, she must’ve washed it just before leaving for the party. She was smiling comradely at others’ greetings, not at me. A moment when suddenly I didn’t believe it: she had materialized, and his woman, that I had—like him, I know—always in my mind, vanished. My mother was signalling to me across the room at the group who were waiting for wine. There was a pretty comb in my mother’s tight and shiny crown of hair, she was neat and beautiful, with the special care she took to dress for parties; she so enjoyed feeding people.

  Baby cut her wrists when she spent a Saturday night with a friend. She didn’t even do it at home, where she had her own room. You think of details like that—crazy—when you don’t have any explanation for what has happened. She didn’t die. A mess in somebody else’s bathroom and some stitches on the inner side of her wrists where you can see the freeways and bypasses of veins just under the skin. Baby is light-skinned, like my mother, not like my father and me. When she was in bed, repaired and sedated by Dr Jasood, for whom my mother worked, my mother came and sat down in the kitchen where I was reading the newspaper because I did not know what I should be doing; he, my father, had taken his briefcase that morning and said he had to be away that weekend. He had looked heavy-limbed, as if he had to make himself go; she must have believed there was some grave political crisis taking him away. She sat on the edge of her chair and looked at me as if she had known me her whole life, not just the span of mine which had begun in her body. As if I were her son and not her son. She said Dr Jasood had just told her it was evident to him that Baby took drugs, that her great liveliness was deep unhappiness. He had been at that party.

  She said to me:—What can we do for her?—

  The slight emphasis on ‘we’ gave away, all
at once, that my mother knew about my father. That she knew—without knowing how—I knew. She discounted him—couldn’t count on him, couldn’t call on Sonny, now, wherever he was, even if he were to be hidden from her only round the corner, he was too far away. I understood. What could we do for my sister: a family that ours had become? And at the same moment it came to both of us: what Baby’s ‘deep unhappiness’ that the doctor diagnosed was about.

  So Baby knew, too. It was just that she managed differently what she knew. The hip, hyped style she flaunted on street corners (out of sight of my mother; I saw her), the flip and vulgar way she—brought up in the sound of my mother’s quiet voice and the poetry of my father’s Shakespeare—talked; the emotional outbursts over trifles, that my mother put down to the strain of having had my father in detention and on trial during the time when her menstrual cycle was being established; her manner of distancing herself from the childhood she and I had in common—all these were her attempts to manage.

  When she had said to me, D’you expect him to be moping around like you?—was she trying to defend my father? Did she think, then, I didn’t know, and probably would find out? Good god. Had she, all this time, been taking his part against my mother? As I tried to shield my mother against him? Female against female. Male against male. So what could we have done for her. To stop her cutting her wrists when she couldn’t manage.

  What could my mother have done for her.

  What could I, her own brother, have done for her.

  What a family he made of us.

  Poor Tom’s a-cold.

  And now joy came often. After prison, where there was nothing to please the senses, where there was not even enough light to read and study by, came this bounty. It flowed from such slight stimulation. They met again for the first time at a house meeting. It was called a debriefing; those who had been inside related their experiences in resisting interrogation, intimidation, solitude, for the benefit of those who might sometime find themselves inside, and for individuals and organizations who sought the best means of supporting those on trial, of which there were many. She sat there with her knees broad apart under one of her long skirts, balancing on her lap the briefcase that served as a table for the notebook. She wrote earnestly. While others spoke, while Sonny spoke. When he paused, her gaze flashed up, narrow-blue, the blonde eyelashes met at the outer corners of her eyes as the lids pleated in a slight smile of encouragement.

  Joy.

  Hannah met Sonny for coffee, for further discussion. It was possible—to take one’s dark face into a coffee bar. And with a white woman companion; to pull out her chair for her and sit opposite her. It had been possible for some time, although, coming from a small town where such barriers fell more slowly if at all, and after two years in a segregated prison, Sonny still had a strange feeling: that he was not really there, a commonplace meeting of this kind was not happening to him. Then they drank coffee and she smoked and said, through the wraiths that undulated between them, he hadn’t changed. In two years.

  —You look very well. Fine. I thought that at the meeting.—

  Her approval was sun on his face. He closed his eyes a moment as he smiled.—Alia was ready to feed me up. But as you can see …I put on weight inside. But not fat, really? I’ve never exercised so regularly in my life! Never had the time, before.—

  —You look so much better than you did when I saw you in prison.—

  —Ah well …detention is terrible. Much worse than a sentence, where you’re sure when the end will come, even if it’s years ahead—you know as well as I do.—

  —Not as well as you do. Or anyone who’s been inside. I know only from the consequences I find, if I get to see people.—

  —I never want to live through that again.—It was a confession; both knew he might be detained once more.

  —It was still great to find you in such good shape after two years of the other kind of inside. I suppose it wouldn’t have been so striking if I’d seen you during that time.—

  He suddenly found it easy to say to her, in her warming presence:—The letters were almost like visits, to me. In some ways, better … because you can read them over. A visit ends quickly. You and the other person never say what you want to say. Tell me—there’s something I never asked you when I wrote back, I wanted to ask you like we are now …I mean, actually here … When you wrote that first time, you said something … you knew I’d come out happy for battle—

  —Well you have, haven’t you.—It was spoken simply, with admiration, no flattery.

  There was a beat of silence.

  In it, Sonny looked at her face without a decent reserve, as he had not freed himself to, before. Thick-fleshed, pearly-skinned modelling with slight scuffed redness here and there when her fingernail or some rough cloth had brushed it; the defining presence in the colour of the eyes, as the enamelled eyes brought to life the beige stone of colour plates in his book on the art of ancient Egypt. He was aware that there was saliva in that mouth and that blonde hair would have a scent of its own.

  —‘Happy for battle’.—He murmured it over.—I’ve wanted to ask where it comes from—I’ve wanted to find out who said it.—He laughed, excited at the idea:—To read what goes with it, for myself.—She watched him, enjoying his enthusiasm, her chin drawn back underlined by the flesh of her neck.

  —Rosa Luxemburg, writing to Karl Kautsky. I’ll bring you the book. Oh there’s so much in her letters! I look forward to what you’ll have to say—

  Joy. That was what went with it. The light of joy that illuminates long talk of ideas, not the 60-watt bulbs that shine on family matters.

  A long time had passed since his political activity had been confined to his own kind—the sub-division of blackness decided by law—and the single issue of removals. In prison he learnt more than the correspondence courses in local government Aila had arranged for him. He had been educated by his fellow political prisoners in the many tactics that evolve from principles of liberation, and how they are unceasingly extended, adapted and put into practice as each issue, however big or small, provides the opportunity, wherever and however. Where people lived in wretched conditions in a ghetto he was one who would be sent to help them set up a residents’ association; when they understood that a rent boycott was a good way to protest, he would be among those to teach them how to organize the campaign. Where miners or municipal workers or workers in a sweet factory or brickyard were on strike, meetings in their support had to be held, T-shirts and stickers had to be seen on the streets until they provoked a ban, and even after, by those people who were prepared at least for a small defiance displayed bobbing against pectorals or breasts. Days of commemoration were arranged in honour of those who had died in uprisings, strikes, school and rent boycotts, street battles with police and army. And all this had to be done anonymously, clandestinely, hoping to escape the eyes of the police, on days and nights when it was better for no-one to know the whereabouts of an absent member of a family.

  Sonny was not a major figure but he was frequently one of the principal speakers where it was possible to hold a public meeting in the semi-legality of some church or university. Hannah was always there. One day of freak cold in April (snow on the Drakensberg too early for winter) the jostle of the group with whom he was coming down from the platform of a city church hall converged with some rows of the audience leaving by a side door, and Sonny and Hannah found themselves drifted together. It was not unexpected, just lucky; he had seen her in the fifth row of seats. They left the hall into the cut of icy wind, into the sights of the police movie crew’s cameras which await people who attend such gatherings as in other countries television crews wait after galas to record the emergence of film stars.

  They turned the corner in the direction opposite to that being taken by the crowd. His face screwed up against the wind, he smiled at her.—So now we’ve had our snap taken.—

  —D’you think they’ll send us a print?—

  He was high-shouldered
against the cold and laughing; they paused a moment, didn’t know where they were headed, along that street. He had on only a shirt and light jacket, but she always had garments to spare, it was her style. She took off her striped knitted scarf.—Please. Put it on, you’ll catch pneumonia. Go on.—

  It was all matter-of-fact. Comradely.—Thanks.—

  He wound that scarf round his neck, tucked the fringed ends under his jacket. The scarf was warm with her warmth. In the gritty cold of the street, the sensation lay upon his nape.

  Joy. From something so slight.

  They were friends for some time before they were lovers. Before the ultimate joy of making love with someone who, too, is in the battle, for whom the people in the battle are her only family, her life, the happiness she understands—as he now does—is the only possible one. She told him afterwards she knew it would be hard for him to allow himself to become her lover; she was satisfied to be his friend so long as that satisfied him. But once they were lying naked together for the first time she made a solemn condition.—I wanted this. Yet I don’t want it at all if it’s going to replace our friendship with something else.—

  He raised himself on his elbow in her bed to look at her with honesty that doesn’t belong in bed. She thought he was about to take the opportunity to tell her right away that he loved his wife, his beautiful wife whom she had seen, visited, shared concern with for his welfare, and to tell her that she herself must know the strict limits of this share of him she was taking. He lay back again.—You are the only friend I’ve ever had. That’s what I feel. Now. That’s what making love with you has told me.—

  The immense reassurance sent her venturing deeper into the territory of intimacy. She wore a curio-store filigree ring, and she began cleaning the dried soap from its recesses with her thumbnail.—And when you first knew Aila …—