My Son's Story

by Nadine Gordimer

  She didn’t exclude Aila; it was one of the things he found remarkable about her, moving, that she did not want to oust Aila—from his mind, when they were together. She conceived of Aila as an equal, not an adversary defeated: she didn’t refer to her as ‘your wife’. He was filled with … gratitude, yes. No guilt, no concealment between them, with her; everything that had remained hungry, stunted, half-realized, streamed towards her through opened gates.

  —We were so simple. You can hardly imagine. In Benoni’s coloured township. Such simple people. And young. I think, you know, our understanding was too easy. The first layer … And you believe that’s all, that’s it. For myself, I’d say I didn’t know what I needed.—

  Needing Hannah. And now she was there, she had discovered Sonny for himself. She was a euphoria natural as a pulse beat with him wherever he went, in the house with him when he came home after he had left her, making him oblivious to the hostility of the boy (after the business of bumping into him at a cinema), making it possible to perform as a father and husband. A husband! Aila was not an emotionally demanding woman—imagine Aila! But she was accustomed to the quiet occurrence of conjugal love-making, that as the children grew up had become less and less frequent, more peripheral to loving. When a daughter begins to show breasts and a son’s voice begins to be mistaken, on the phone, for his father’s, there comes a kind of reversal of the clandestinity courting couples have to practise in the house of their parents: the long-married now feel an inhibition about making love in the presence—separated only by the bedroom walls—of children who themselves are now capable of feeling the same sexual desires. Of course, this never would be said openly, between Aila and him; but it must have been there, and it meant she didn’t expect—she didn’t expect him to expect—to make love to her more than occasionally. And this periodicity surely had been extended by the two years in prison. It did not mean there was no physical contact between them. On the contrary, once in the dark, wordless, Aila always moved into his shelter, against his chest or round his back, and neither was roused by the warmth of his genitals against her or the shape of her breasts in his hands. They would fall asleep; fall away from each other only in sleep, as they had done for years, as they cleaned their teeth before bed and she creamed her hands.

  The first time he had to make love to his wife after he had begun to make love to Hannah—it was not so much that too much time had gone by, but that he quickly learned, as a novice deceiver, that to avoid this was the surest way to give himself away—he trembled with sorrow and disgust at himself after he withdrew from her body. The caresses were an easy performance, rehearsed in the habit of marriage, without feeling, dutiful to please Aila, but the uncontrollable animal thrill of his orgasm was horrible. He wanted to get up out of that bed and house and go to Hannah. Shut out everything, himself, blotted against the being of Hannah. And every now and then, in the carefully arranged and guarded life he was managing, when he judged it was time to approach Aila again—to pretend to want poor Aila, oh my god—the act drained him, in shame. Sometimes he felt a final spurt of anger, towards Aila, sperm turned to venom.

  For months the most precious aspect of his new life with Hannah was that it was clandestine. Like underground political life, it had nothing to do with the everyday. They owned one another because their times together were shared with no-one. They could not even be in anyone else’s thoughts in any way that could reach out and touch them, because no-one knew where they were when they were together. To Sonny, who never before had used the commonplace deceptions—the meetings he was supposed to be attending, the visit to Pretoria she was supposed to be making in the course of her work—these were a kind of magic that made them invisible to the ordinary world he had inhabited all his life. Something he never would have thought possible. When he and she found themselves in the same public company at the same time, it was—to them—part of their wonderful spell of intimacy that there shouldn’t be the slightest possibility that anyone else present should know of the secret knowledge of each other only those two, themselves, had. They were so successful that now and then somebody would introduce them: I don’t think you’ve met …this is …

  Sonny and Hannah: presented each to the other, as strangers, by a third person. What secret pleasure, to conceal the desire between them that this titillated! Sonny had revealed to him how part of the need in his life had been of a sense of erotic fun. To leave, separately, a gathering where each had given full attention to serious decisions (for the roused state of an ecstatic love affair, in men and women mutually dedicated to a political ideal and battle, heightens their concentration and application in relation to these) and fifteen minutes later be undressing each other: what an exquisite range of changing responses such an afternoon expanded! How much that he never would have known he was capable of experiencing, never ever. That it needed the secret (secret everywhere) presence of this woman, this ample girl—she was younger than she looked—to make possible for him. For months when they talked after love-making it was of the remote places they would like to go together. Islands off this or that continent. Forests in the mountains. Nothing but gulls or owls. Like all lovers, they did not know they were trying to prolong by transformation into words, into the future tense, the physical illusion of personal freedom that fades as the lulled and sated senses come back and will relay the knowledge of time passing with traffic: work, loss, hunger and pain, pacing out there in the street: other people.

  But even if the islands and forests were only post-coital reveries, they had Hannah’s cottage, Hannah’s bed, which was unlike any other bed Sonny had ever known, not only because of what passed between her and him there but because it was not a bed at all—a very big mattress laid directly on the floor. He thought when he first saw it that it meant she was not properly settled in; or perhaps it was some Japanese idea. There were so many tastes, he, coming from his background, did not know about. Futon? she prompted, and laughed. Ah, no, just that she liked to be close to the wood of the floor, the earth beneath it. And how right she was. How unnecessary to have little bedside cabinets with hand-woven lampshades you had to be careful not to knock over in your sleep. Under the softness of the mattress only the law of gravity itself.

  If his need of Hannah was terrible—in a magnificent way—then there was no need of anything or anyone else. She knew a lot of poetry—his Shakespeare was a poor stock, compared with hers. She taught him a love-poem he had never heard of, didn’t know it was something done to death everyone who had taken a university first-year course in English literature could reel off. It described perfectly those months when Hannah’s one room, for them, was ‘an everywhere’.

  This perfect isolation existed while Sonny and Hannah seemed to themselves to be getting away with the impossible. Its very intensity was granted on the condition that it could not last. Everything outside was ready to rupture it. Circumstance, conscience—there was a rictus of dire fear, to admit it—might take her from him, him from her, any day. But months went by. Their concealment of each other from the world continued to be successful. And now they passed into the second stage of the syndrome that Sonny, never having had the experience before, did not recognize. The fascination in living something totally removed from domestic love with its social dimensions of ordinary shared pleasures among other people gave way to dissatisfaction that they could not do these ordinary things together. For these belonged to Aila, Aila and the children. He could visit friends with Aila, and have her sitting there talking trivialities in the usual corner with the women while he was in a discussion at the other end of the room, a discussion Hannah would have been taking part in, they would have been contributing to together, complementing each other’s ideas. He could go to a play (since they had moved to the city he had encouraged his family to take the opportunity to enjoy black theatre) with Aila and his son and daughter but there would not come from them the kind of comment, challenging his own thoughts, he would have had if Hannah had been with him. And th
ere grew in him, in her—he knew it was against all sense and reason—a defiant desire to be seen to belong together. To show each other off. They didn’t admit it, but knew it was there, as they knew everything about one another while in their chosen isolation.

  Once they were taken by an obstinate, irresistible hankering to see a film together. An ordinary thing like that, which any other couple could do. Instead of spending the afternoon making love, they went across the city to a cinema complex in a suburb where neither knew anyone, a suburb of rich white people who never attended protest meetings or knew, had seen in flesh and blood, anyone who had been a political prisoner. And there, of course—they might have known it. The one encounter they never could have envisaged, something utterly against all probability. They walked out of the dark cinema straight into the afternoon glare and his son. They showed themselves off; to his son.

  The instinct was to go to her cottage and hide. Sonny was silent, his eyes concealed from Hannah, as he could do, drawing his thick eyebrows down around their deep darkness. She was afraid. But he did not leave her, he did not say you have destroyed my family. She saw how he had changed; how she had changed him without knowing. They talked of the Italian film and not about the boy. He embraced her passionately before he left her in the early evening and went back to his family; he must already have made up his mind, calmly, how he would deal with his son. He said only:—Don’t worry. Not about Will, either.—

  And however it was that he managed, it was clear, later, that the boy never said anything—to his mother, to anyone. —He didn’t mention it to you?—

  —No. It’s as if it never happened.—

  All Hannah said was:—That can’t be.—

  The room was not an everywhere because it could not contain the commonplaces of being together, the boring humdrum pleasures, the very state of daily deadened life their relationship escaped and was superior to, the state—of marriage?

  From the surety of having everything, they had changed to wanting everything. Even that. They began to make more little excursions outside her bed and the cottage. She had a friend who was an absentee farmer. They went to picnic on the farm. At the beginning of the drive the freeway took them past the Reef town in whose area for his kind he had grown up, taught school, shopped trailing his children on Saturday mornings … as he turned his head to watch glint past the lake made of pumped water from the mines, the buff yellow slopes of abandoned dumps, he had the tingling feeling of the unaccountable familiarity of a foreign country. She promised him fields of sunflowers because he liked so much the Van Gogh reproduction that was stuck up in her tiny kitchen among the drawings made by black children. But she had mistaken the season. The sunflower fields were a vast company of the dead, with black faces bowed. She swung against him in contrition as they walked through the veld; they laughed and kissed. He got splinters of fibre in his hands as he picked a dead flower for her, a souvenir.

  He had such good alibis. Like all lovers, they longed to sleep together for a whole night, nights. Sonny could be absent from home without explanation, and the old restrictions of colour were abolished in most hotels and resorts. So they were free; once they spent two days of this kind of freedom somewhere in the Eastern Transvaal, and even stood among white Sunday families with grannies and squealing children, watching the young hatch on a crocodile farm. After intervals imposed by Sonny’s political obligations—and neither he nor she ever neglected their work—and when another kind of absence from home could be justified by these demands, they went away together, even if sometimes only for a night. He had promised her a whole weekend again, and he managed it, not without some embarrassing lying to be done, to his comrades—a pretence, to them as well, that he would be incommunicado because of some contacts to be made about which he couldn’t talk. When he left his home on Saturday morning he had, for the first time, instead of euphoria inside him, a surly unease; there was a moment, as his son stood back as he passed him in the passage, when he almost turned and put down that briefcase (briefcase!) and didn’t leave. But the moment was forgotten as soon as he left the house. In a rondavel resort among orange blossom near Rustenburg Sonny and Hannah were unspeakably happy. People say one could die for such happiness, but one also could kill for it, kill all other claims on oneself by people who have failed to bring it about. The scent of orange blossom was air itself, night and day, every drawn breath like the manifest emanation of private happiness, the wafting secretion of their one body, joined in love-making.

  When Sonny came back on Sunday night he found his daughter had cut her wrists.

  That didn’t put an end to it. What Baby did that time.

  We were sitting in the kitchen, my mother and I—as if we were back in the old place at Benoni—when we heard him come home. We heard the briefcase put down and the creak of his soles, we were so quiet because Baby was asleep down the passage with her bandaged wrists laid outside the sheet. My mother stood up and went to stop him coming into the kitchen where I was. I heard her soft voice telling him—and then suddenly, high:—Don’t!—as his tread broke out hard and fast along the passage.

  He came back slowly, and into the kitchen. He had seen my sister but not wakened her. My mother was sitting there again. I was with her, I had been with her ever since it happened, he had to face me. And I to face him. He wandered to the fridge and poured himself his glass of water. I wanted to laugh and knock it out of his hand. He stood there drinking and his head moved, he was not exactly shaking it, it moved vaguely like the involuntary movement of an old man. But it’s no good putting on a performance for me, he was not a poor distraught old father, he was only too strong and healthy, a fucker. What could my father say? If Baby had died on Saturday he wouldn’t have been there. Couldn’t be reached. He made sure of that. Nobody knew where he was. My mother was the one who saw the blood. And I.

  —Will there be scars.—

  That was all he could dare to say.

  And it didn’t stop him, it didn’t stop them. It only made me cruel. That Sunday night. I wanted to go to my room and take out from behind my old soccer boots and roller skates—kid’s things you never throw away—the dead head of a sunflower, and fling it at him.

  He never tried to explain anything. He no longer cared enough for us to feel the need—to try and make us understand what had happened to him. Oh he was shattered that night and there was no-one to help him. The three of us were in the kitchen together, and he was alone. I had thought—had I?—he would break down and confess, we would weep, it would be all over, he would take my mother in his arms, she would take him in her arms. ‘Will there be scars’: that’s all. Our presence, my mother’s and mine, drove him away alone to the sitting-room, that he and my mother had been so proud of, a decent place for her, at last. He sat there alone in the dark. She put milk on the stove to heat and I watched her make cocoa and take it in there, to him. I don’t know if he said anything to her. She seemed to know he wouldn’t eat. Still so considerate of him, my mother; still so respectful of this husband and father who had gone to prison for the future of our kind.

  Baby was his favourite child—I always knew that—his daughter was his darling, his beauty, even though he quoted Shakespeare to me and wanted me to bring him glory by growing up to be a writer just to please him. But although the child he used to be so in love with had now wanted, even if only for a mad moment, to die, and no-one dared get her to say why, he couldn’t come back to her. He couldn’t stay in the house with us. When my sister was ‘better’—what she had done to herself became an illness or accident that had happened to her, that was the only way we could deal with it in our house—she and my mother and father discussed what she wanted to do. All was resolved as a matter of the right occupation. And he was the one to know all about guidance, career guidance, he was once a schoolteacher. Her whole future before her etc.; the usual parents’ stuff, as if they were the usual parents. My sister fell in with the spirit of the performance. I heard her say it, Oh she was sick
of studying. She wanted to take a job. For a while; she’d study again later. (This thrown in, I know, for darling daddy and his old ambitions for his children to be useful, therefore educated, citizens.) She knew my mother wouldn’t believe her, my mother knew she would find some other life, unplanned for her. He knew, surely, that something had driven her out; he didn’t stay to find out why. He fled the house again with that briefcase—did my father keep a toothbrush in it or was he so thick with that woman that he used hers?

  And what I couldn’t get over was how my sister made it easy for him. Perhaps she did it for my mother’s sake, too, but the fact is it had the effect of letting him off the misery he was sentenced to those first few days; she made it possible for that to be shed with her bandages. She appeared with brightly-painted wooden bracelets on each wrist—African artifacts. He didn’t have to see the scars. She has beautiful straight shiny hair, like my mother’s, and she had it frizzed; in her ‘convalescence’ she went about the house, one of my old shirts tied under her naked breasts, midriff showing, her Walkman hooked to a wide belt and plugged into her ears, moving her hips and head to a beat no-one else could hear. It was tacitly accepted that these were signs of a natural girlish independence; she wanted to earn her own living, she had offered.

  She talked to me about that Saturday night as if it were some particularly daring party escapade to boast about. I couldn’t see how she’d want to; she should have talked to him, really, it was his affair just like his other affair. She was determined to bring it up with me.—You never open your mouth, but I suppose you wonder why anyone’d do such a stupid thing.—

  —Like what?—But she knew I was stalling; and she didn’t want to come right out with it, either—‘trying to kill myself’.

  —I’d had a bust-up with Marcia, she’s always so nosy, like into everything, sticky fingers getting in my hair. I don’t know why I let her pester me to spend the night, anyway. And the crowd that turned up at her place because they knew her folks were away, Jimmy and Alvin and that lot. I can’t stand them, really. She said Jackie and Dawn and them (how many years had my father spent trying to get his Baby to drop her peers’ bad grammar) were coming but she’s a liar, she did it to persuade me to stay with her, because they never came. What was there to do but smoke. So I was rather stoned, and on top of it, when I wanted to get away from them and their lousy yakking and yelling and dancing like a pack of drunk wildebeest, there was a couple busy on the bed. They hadn’t even shut the door.—