My Son's Story

by Nadine Gordimer

  But he saw in the lawyer’s face that he had explained nothing, and he tried once more to evade the complete understanding there. He sat back in the chair on the other side of the desk and looked into eyes black as his own, the eyes of old races. —She’s an invaluable person.—

  Despite the unwelcome understanding of the lawyer he felt relieved—when you are in a political trial every hidden motive, every vestige of contradiction, every hesitation of purpose must be confided, so that you may be defended even against your own high principles, the dangerous licence of confidence cannot be revoked. The matter was in hand—the lawyer’s soothing phrase. For results, one must be patient; and as she said, she could not come back for some weeks, anyway …

  Right from the first day she had been less alarmed than Sonny; he realized he had discounted the preoccupation of her feelings at the loss of her grandfather, who had been also a father—and mother—to her. She was back there sorting the old missionary’s papers and simple possessions, sorting through her childhood, unable even to point it out to him in passing as he had done the place in the veld outside Benoni, to her, when they were driving by. Action on her behalf was being taken at home and in London. He was kept busy planning and running workshops—‘resistance education’ (the name he coined for it, approved)—in shanties and mud churches, under the guise of local club meetings, since the National Education Crisis Committee was restricted by a ban, and in the spare time he would have been able to spend with her there was the quiet house, thank heaven, with only the boy around. And Will was less hostile, sometimes it seemed even possible to touch him. Ah, without women, what is always subliminally taut between men is relaxed. The boy was a man, almost a man. He could be trusted; hadn’t he proved he could be trusted, he would not even meet your eyes to show he remembered. If told to forget he had heard someone visit the house he would do as he must.

  The men who had come that night sought to form a cabal (how poor and melodramatic the political vocabulary was) to oust certain leaders. They were ‘putting out feelers’ to individuals from several organizations to see who was ‘like-minded’—sidling euphemisms. They had not succeeded in gaining a recruit; but they read a certain distraction in ‘Sonny’ as reason to take the chance that he would allow himself to forget they had come, and give no warning to anyone.

  There was something on the stoep. A bundle.

  As he stopped, coming through the bougainvillea which concealed the side entrance to the garden, he saw an object; suspiciously—explosive booby traps as well as ordure can be placed on the doorsteps of political prisoners’ friends. Coming closer, he made out a sleeper—some meths drinker must have found the deserted cottage convenient to camp against—then, seeing that the sleeping bag was new and a man’s hand (young, white, with one of those twenty-four-hour military format watches on the wrist) was visible over the hidden head, stopped again.

  Who was Sonny to intercept an intruder. How could he account for himself, approaching this cottage, key in his pocket. He had better go away. Come back later. The telephone would ring and not be answered; he called out as if the place belonged to him—What do you think you’re doing here! Hey!—

  The hand flew away from the head. A young man struggled out of the bag, unembarrassed, with a sleepy glance of recognition, confirmation.

  Sonny had never seen him before in his life.

  The young man circled his shoulders in their sockets to ease stiffness and breathed deeply. He had pollen-coloured spiky-cut hair too short to be tousled by sleep, a woman’s pretty nose and long-lashed grey eyes, and a man’s dark strong growth of a few days’ beard. He half-smiled, and nodded, as if his man had arrived as summoned, on time.

  —This is private property. What do you want here?—This person knew him; must have seen him in newspaper photographs.

  Or it could be on video as one of the Security Police’s film stars. He believed he had learnt to be alert without becoming paranoid, but the place where this intruder was waiting—waiting for him, clearly—her cottage, their room, to which he would return again and again, unable to keep away, and the move—the entry restriction timed to get rid of her without arresting or deporting her—these circumstances experience entitled him to interpret as put together by the people who knew all about him, the majors and sergeants who had interrogated him in detention, watched him through the Cyclops’s eye of his cell door in prison, and were aware, without seeing, when she took him into her body in this cottage. He, like all his kind, educated in political struggle, knew them, too; the majors and sergeants. He knew what could be ready to follow the circumstances: re-detention, blackmail—not with money, between police and revolutionaries there is a higher exchange, the selling of trust. Not a domestic affair, telltattling to the wife that you’re playing around (their kind of vocabulary) if you don’t answer questions satisfactorily. They know ‘Sonny’ wouldn’t betray his comrades for that; the wife knows about his blonde and she’s the submissive type who would forgive him, anyway. Then what? What? His woman in Lesotho; but if they had wanted to strike one of their dread barters with him (we’ll detain her for the political confidences you’ve made to her, unless you give us some confidences)—if they wanted to do that, they would have kept her in the country, not shut her out!

  The young man was standing there, the jeans, the sneakers, the haircut, like any roadside figure thumbing a lift; but in front of her door.—We’d better go inside.—

  Sonny gave an authoritative high laugh.—Look, you take your bag and get out of here. Just go.—

  —I’ve got something to tell you. But inside. From a friend of yours. I was with her the day before yesterday.—

  —I’m not expecting any messages from anybody, and I want you out of here. I don’t want to know who you are and where you come from.—

  The young man listened with assurance and condescending understanding. –All right. I have some sort of fancy credential. ’Sermons in stones, and good in everything’.—

  The young man was living in the cottage while he was back at the house with his son, Will. It was what Hannah asked of Sonny, her message: let this person stay in the cottage, give him the key. The key? He stood in a hardware store while a duplicate was cut, and a slow depression sank his gaze to the tools and gadgets that furnished other people’s lives—his own, part of Saturday purchases, when he did house-proud repairs in the first, the ghetto home.

  The man called himself Nick, since there had to be something to address him by. She must have thought the clandestinity of the cottage was ready-made for another kind, as well; a good place for an infiltrator. As it was known she was away, no-one would have any reason to approach it. And the people in the main house? What about them? Sonny was choked with such questions during the phone calls, unable to ask her anything, unable even to indicate that the guest had arrived and was in the room while the call was made, since he went out only at night. Did she understand it was dangerous for her lover to be in the cottage with this guest even for the duration of the phone call? If the man were discovered to be in the country, were followed and picked up, Sonny would be picked up with him and detained for interrogation about his association with him, charged with aiding and abetting whatever it was he was doing—and what that was Sonny could not ask. The discipline of the struggle prevailed between them; each to his own task. But when the young man was asleep (he slept during the day) Sonny went through the cupboards and likely places in the cottage where guns or explosives might have been stowed away; he would not allow such material to be there to compromise her with some charge that her cottage was in fact a cache for arms. He could not warn her that she might come back and step straight into a Security Police vehicle. He could only say: don’t hurry back, take your time …

  The young man slept in the big bed close to the earth. He did not wake, when being observed. His socks hung on the radiator where her intimate garments had. Sonny left food for him in her kitchen each time and went away for another two days. When he got bac
k home he would call out, Will? But he always knew whether or not the boy was there; like his mother’s, his presence could be sensed.

  All dogs love me, no problem, the young man had told him when he asked about the dogs raising the alarm when a stranger came and went through the garden. But the people in the main house must nevertheless notice there was someone coming to and fro at the cottage. Someone other than himself, the man they must think of as her man. Perhaps, unlike himself, they expected a woman like her, free-living, alone, doing some kind of leftish good works, content to hire converted servants’ quarters, to have men coming and going. Perhaps they had known of some other man before himself.

  One afternoon the young man was gone. When Hannah phoned, on time, he couldn’t tell her that, either, but the spirit in his voice and the caressing chatter that came from him must have told her for him. He felt strongly sure she would soon be back. He had never cleaned house before—in his kind of family women cooked and cleaned, only his son, wanting to differentiate himself in every way, helped out in the kitchen—but he stripped the bed, swept the room, found the product with which to wash the bath. The man had left behind, shed, his hitchhiker’s outfit. Must have changed persona for the next stage of his mission. In the bathroom was an open bottle of hair bleach with a picture of a grinning blonde combing flying tresses. But Sonny’s Hannah needed no bleach or paint. He threw out the bottle with the bundle of clothes, it was the day of the week the dustmen came to take away the white suburb’s trash and he saw, in the lane as he left the cottage by the hidden gate, one of the black men rummage the bundle out of the mess of newspapers and kitchen debris and consider the usefulness of the garments as other than a disguise. Sonny smiled, felt that it was right. A conclusion that restored balance to something he found distasteful and distorted, a means he did not want for his ends. Sermons in stones, and good in everything; that was not to be used as a password, in the mouth of a third person.

  She’s cut off her hair.

  I had come back from classes to the empty house and parked my motorcycle on the stoep as I always did for safety, and when I opened the door someone was standing there. She’d heard me thumping the bike up the steps and she was waiting, presenting the surprise of her return. I recognized her as you do someone in a photograph taken at a time and in a place when you didn’t yet know them, or after they were as you had known them. The shape of her face was changed by the short curls brushed around it, the small flat ears with, always, some little decoration dangling from the lobe, had disappeared, the polished curve of the forehead was hidden by a fluffed-up fringe. She flung her arms round my neck and hugged me. A line drew between her beautiful eyes with the joyful intensity with which she looked at me, took me in. My mother was never demonstrative like that. But they were her eyes.

  —What happened?—

  She was laughing with pleasure.—Oh everything’s fine. Baby is blooming. You wouldn’t know her, so grownup, completely in charge …—

  —What have you done? Why did you do it?—

  —You mean this?—she poked her fingers through the curls. —Oh this. All those years. It was enough. Don’t you like it? Don’t you think it’s nice, Will?—

  I could only smile and move my shoulders; I’m not her husband, she doesn’t have to try to please me.

  We went into the kitchen, our old place to talk. She took my mother’s chair at the table, she made tea. She was telling me about where Baby lived, what good friends Baby had, responsible people who looked after her, not at all what one thought it would be, considering some of the people she’d mixed with here.—They made me so welcome. She shares the house, of course, but can you imagine, she’s planted herbs in the garden—Baby!—

  —She didn’t leave to go gardening, though. What does she do—or couldn’t she say.—

  —Well, you don’t ask questions, of course, but she was quite open, she seems to be busy with the reception of refugees—not exactly refugees, people like herself, who come out. They have to be investigated. You know.—The big eyes moved over me.

  So my mother understands the ambiguities of liberation, now, the screening and interrogation carried out not by the Security Police but by her daughter. Baby has instructed her.

  —Was it Baby’s idea?—She knows I mean the hair.

  —Will! You’d be so pleased to see how she is … She was watching me brushing it one day and she said, how old are you now, Ma? She never remembers! She always thinks I’m younger than I am. So I reminded her. She said, and how much of your life have you spent doing that—so next day we went to the hairdresser and I had it off.—

  She turned her profile to me as if to let me acknowledge the full effect.

  I said nothing.

  —I feel so much lighter.—She was looking at me shyly to see if I would not be glad of that.—And has everything been all right?—

  We don’t mention him by name, not yet. She’s thinking of police raids, no doubt; of his safety. Could I tell her something else, that he’s been home a lot, even playing chess with me? But I can’t because that would be a comment on what we’re both not supposed to know, the reality I protect her from.

  —Oh as usual. Except the yard’s a bit of a mess. I did get round to cutting the grass once, but my work-load’s quite tough, I’ve had a lot of reading to do.—

  —Did you eat?—

  And now we both smile.—I cooked. It seemed to be okay.—

  She knows I fed him, she could count on me, now she wants me to like what Baby has done to her, her hair.

  —There’s more to tell but we’ll wait until your father comes in.—

  So he’s there, spoken out loud between us.—What’s it all about? Why not now?—

  —Because I’d only have to tell it over again.—

  This woman with dull permed curls. She’s never put us in the same category before, him and me; since when are our unspoken confidences the same as the sort of silences between them?

  She never came back. Cut loose. She was gone for good: my mother.

  Aila’s mission was the kind to be expected of her; she has brought women’s tidings, a mother’s news. Baby is married. But for security reasons not even that domestic intelligence could have been transmitted over the telephone or by letter; not to this house. Baby hadn’t told her father herself. Couldn’t. Sonny was informed along with his son, by his wife. A family matter. There should have been kisses, handclasps, a Saturday tea-party with beer for the uncles, Aila with her shining coil of hair, wearing a new dress home-made for the occasion.

  The boy said nothing, as usual. Apparently he had no feeling for his sister. Aila had met the man, Aila thought he was nice, steady, good enough for their—Sonny’s—daughter, his Baby; he had not been asked. On the contrary, the fact was accomplished without him and now he was the one humbly to put questions. Aila confirmed that the young man was someone Baby had known before she left: so they left together, then, and that was something else that had not been confided in her father. She went away with a man, she had been living with a man while he was with his woman in the cottage. As discreet, not only politically, as the father himself.

  The young man—husband!—was one of their own kind, not some white foreigner (apparently poor Aila had feared that?) his Baby might have been expected to pick up. ‘Steady’—as if Benoni standards could apply to the life of a Freedom Fighter …poor Aila! He was known by his code name, was something quite important among the younger people in the movement, one didn’t ask, he and Baby didn’t talk about it, maybe even she does not know exactly. He has been trained in other parts of Africa and overseas. He has a family here at home but thinks it best they should not be contacted to toast the alliance—for security reasons.

  —His family aren’t involved at all.—Aila is quite self-assured about the whole business, for once she’s taken on responsibility for something all by herself, she’s the one who’s given approval in this matter of his daughter’s future.

  Out of his hurt, Sonn
y felt a heavy sense of lack of occasion in all three of them, Aila, Will, himself. He made some effort, before them, for them.—Well, that’s good news, let’s hope they’ll be happy …and strong in their work.—

  The presence of the boy makes everything he says sound fatuous; the moment the boy’s mother is back he withdraws again from any male understanding. And Aila gave instructions: —We won’t talk about the marriage to anyone.—

  What idea was that? Since when did Aila decide what was politically expedient? Since when did she think she understood such things? Did she really believe the Security Police weren’t aware by now where Baby was and what she was doing? —Why not?—

  She felt the gibe in her husband’s remark and turned her head away from the two men.—I have to be able to go back.—

  The day of her return ended as all days do in a marriage, with them alone in their bedroom. Sonny and Aila. No matter what has happened during the day, there is no escaping that dread conclusion. They performed the rituals of preparation for bed that had preceded all kinds of nights, years of nights, for them; drawing curtains, washing, brushing teeth as had been done to be pleasing in the taste of kisses, undressing before each other as they had done in the delightful gaze of desire. His bundle of sex hung like something disowned by his body. She folded her garments one by one over the chair, the stockings holding the form of her legs and feet. She began to unpack toilet things from a floral-printed bag.—I didn’t want to say in front of Will—Aila stood there in her nightgown in the middle of the room as if it were somewhere she had entered without knocking. He was setting the hour on his bedside alarm radio, and he looked at her at last.—He’s not a child—what’s the matter? What is it?—A thrill of fear for Baby flashed through him impatiently.

  —She’s expecting.—

  The genteel euphemism carried over from back-yard gossip in their old life. He laughed, gently correcting:—She’s pregnant. I don’t think Will is unaware of these possibilities … So. So that’s the reason for the marriage.—