My Son's Story

by Nadine Gordimer

  —Oh no.—She paused to have him acknowledge another possibility.—They would’ve married anyway. They love each other.—

  He pulled back the covers on his side of the bed and sat down.—Family life—babies—it doesn’t go too well with activism like theirs. Doesn’t really do, anywhere, but particularly in exile.—

  —Well, they have permission to live outside the camp.—

  —Yes you told us. Her vegetable patch.—

  —She’s very pleased about the baby. You wouldn’t have thought she’d have such strong maternal instincts, would you?—

  —When they grow up …what can one know about them.—

  —And they’re even sure what it’s going to be—a boy. There’s a test you can have, these days, imagine that!—

  Yes, Aila has been brought to life—that’s how he sees it—by the idea of a birth, a new life coming out of the old one he left her buried in. Aila looks like any other woman, now, with that same hair—do they wear it to make them seem younger. She’ll never sit at the dressing-table before bed, brushing that long, straight shining hair, again. He’s rid of Aila. Free.

  He slowly swung his legs onto the bed and dropped the covers over himself up to the chest. With closed eyes, a moment, he heard her moving about the room, saw Baby dancing, coming to kiss him on the ear, saw her glittering eyes smeared with mascara. Married. Baby. How could she know her own mind, so displaced, far from home. But in the struggle no-one is underage, unprepared for anything, children throw stones and get shot.—She’s so young.—He hardly knew he had spoken aloud: Aila heard it as a momentary lapse into intimacy. She said:—So was I.—

  He opened his eyes. Much younger. Eighteen-year-old. Aila had taken a long shining black plait from the toilet bag. It was tied with a scrap of ribbon where the hair had been severed. There was the rustle of a sheet of tissue paper Aila smoothed before she folded the plait within it and put it away in a drawer.

  The other woman came back the same week. He had longed for her so painfully it seemed at times he couldn’t get enough oxygen into his lungs, breathing was constricted by the intensity of the fear she would not be allowed to cross the frontier, and he would never get a passport so that he could go to her. And yet his only relief from tension over the ambiguities and intrigues that were growing in the movement was to turn to this other anguish, his need of Hannah. And from that anguish back to dismay at the position he was being manoeuvred into by certain comrades.

  When she told him on the phone that she was cleared, she’d received a visa and was arriving at the weekend he begged, insisted she let him meet her at the airport although that would be an offence against discretion as well as security—that moral code he and she strictly imposed upon themselves.

  He wouldn’t come into the terminal arrivals hall, he’d be there in the underground car-park, she’d make her way with her suitcase towards him in the echoing daylight dusk of the cement cavern smelling of exhaust fumes … The empty cottage where he was holding the telephone receiver was already rein-habited by her. He was wild with anticipation: what Hannah could make him feel! Never in his life before—fifty years, my god—had he been capable of such emotions. He was old when he was young, that was it; a reversal: it was only now he knew what it should have been like to be young. The night before Hannah was to arrive he took a sleeping pill to subdue his excitement; to blot out the presence of Aila beside him in bed.

  While he was waiting in half-dark, underground, surrounded by the inert relics vehicles become when they are stationary, by footsteps fading, footsteps approaching and passing on the periphery of his senses, he suddenly felt all life and will leaving him. All at once. It was again the moment when, driving somewhere in the Vaal Triangle, full of purpose directed towards the meeting he was going to address, he had had the awful impulse to let go of the steering-wheel, had seen himself careering in a car out of control, to an end, an abandonment. Now in the garage he got out of the car to master himself; he arranged himself standing to meet her when she would appear. He kept swallowing and his hands felt thick and dull. The place was cold, a vast burial chamber. An old black man slopping a mop from a bucket over a luxury car was a menial entombed along with a Pharaoh. She would appear with her suitcase; nothing would stop that happening. There she was, as she had to be: she had seen him, she was coming towards him slowly, ceremoniously, solemnly after so long and difficult a parting, walking sturdily on her pale freckled legs, her body tilted sideways by the weight of the suitcase, her blondness back-lit by the shaft of light coming from the stairs. He felt nothing. He stood there smiling and managed to open his hands away from his body to make way for her; there was nothing behind these gestures. She took his silence and the hard abrupt embrace as an excess of emotion stifled by prudence in this strange public place where there seemed to be no witness except an old cleaner; but of course she was back here, where one could never be sure to be unobserved. She herself was laughing and in tears. On the way to the cottage she poured out all the details of the visa affair she had had to keep back, over the telephone. Her hand came to rest, spread gently and firmly on his thigh as he drove; a claim upon him.

  Once they were again in the bed it was as if what had happened down in that cavern had never been. Close to the earth; Sonny was back to earth, human and struggling, able to touch and feel and scent the wonderful upheaval of life.

  — … He slept here. I used to come in and see him snoring there on your bed …—He shook his head, and she smiled and kissed his neck.—But why did you give him that password, Hannah? Why couldn’t you have thought of something else?—

  —What else could I have sent that would make you absolutely sure? What else is there that belongs only to us?—

  —Well now there’s a third person.—

  —Oh never. To him it’s like anything else that’s used. Once the purpose is served, it’s over. You know. He’s forgotten already. It’s only to us …for him, there are other things on his mind. He’s quite extraordinary …what he’s brought off …in and out, here, several times.—

  —Don’t tell me. And forget whatever that is, yourself. I don’t know how successful he was. Whether he was ever followed, whether they played the old game of letting him lead them to his contacts, including this cottage. How do I know? I couldn’t watch the place all the time …and he was so cocky and relaxed, didn’t give a damn, never said anything. And that telephone was frustrating. I couldn’t tell you, ask you anything about the fellow. He could have been picked up and I along with him, and you wouldn’t have known.—

  She was considering, a moment, whether this was a reproach. But between them, that wasn’t possible; you don’t live for each other, the loving is contained within the cause, and there would be no love if you were to refuse, because of personal risk, something expected of you by the struggle. She didn’t know how to phrase this; did not have to because he was speaking again.—I hope you investigated him thoroughly before you let him use us. You know that, with me, it’s not only myself—there’s always the risk of the movement being infiltrated through me; any one of us.—

  —My dear love, don’t you trust me?—

  —I’ve told you before what you are for me.—

  She hid her face against him, muffling her voice.—‘You are the only friend I’ve ever had.’—

  He pulled her head away, distorting between his long hands her soft pastel cheeks in pressure against the brilliant blue chips of her eyes, and kissed eyes, nose, mouth as if to efface her. They made love again, the kind of love-making that brings the dependent fear that one could never live, again, without it.

  When they were lying quiet, she made her usual principled acknowledgement of the limit of her claim.—How are things at home? Is Aila back yet?—

  —She arrived a few days ago. Will behaved quite reasonably with me …even cooked some meals …—

  She squeezed his hand.—Of course, he’s a good boy, he’s just like you, underneath. You’ll see how he’ll turn out.
—

  She might have been a wife, reassuring him about his children. What games are played, between lovers!—My daughter’s married, you may be surprised to hear. I was.—

  Hannah laughed.—No, not surprised at all. She’s a very attractive girl. Not as beautiful as her mother, but still lovely. Who’s she married? Someone in Lusaka, of course?—

  —But like the rest of us, originally from the ghettos. I’ve never met him. Aila likes him. So I hope it’s not a big mistake.—

  —Why should it be a mistake?—

  —Marriage, these days. In their circumstances, the instability, exile, no home—what for? Marriage implies certain social structures, and we’re busy breaking up the existing ones, we have to, it’s the task of our time, our children’s time. I don’t know why she wants it; she’s got a head on her, young as she is. At least I thought she had.—

  —You think they should just live together?—

  They look at each other: like Baby’s father and his lover.

  —Yes, while they can. There’ll be long separations, each will have to go where they’re sent. Marriage is for one place, one way of life. It’s a mistake for them. Live together while you can, as long as it’s possible, and then, well—

  —Aila surely wouldn’t want that. Isn’t she pleased?—

  He put his hands up over his face a moment and breathed out through his fingers.—She’s pleased.—

  He did not continue with what he was about to say; he did not tell Hannah his daughter was going to have a child.

  I wonder how she feels making love with a grandfather. That didn’t stop him either. I wonder how he could go on doing it knowing he was so old—what’s it? Over fifty—and some other man was also doing the same thing to his darling daughter.

  Fucking his pudding-faced blonde (pink blancmange like my mother used to make for us out of a packet when we were kids) while he ought to be dandling his grandchild on his knee. It’s disgusting to think like this about him, I know, but he’s the one who’s brought it about. That’s the educational opportunity the progressive schoolteacher arranged for me.

  I should have thought—I did think, when my mother told me about my sister’s baby—that, at last, would have been the end of it, for him. Even if he hadn’t stopped when my sister tried to kill herself because of him, his old obsession with self-respect might have stopped him now. A grandfather, the great lover! My father, who has never looked ridiculous in his whole life. If not his famous self-respect, then self-esteem, vanity, I should have thought—I notice in the bathroom in the mornings he has quite a paunch, there’s grey in his chest-hair. When he yawns, his breath is bad. He must have some dignity left, after all.

  But no. Everything goes on as it has for—how long is it already? I keep thinking of it as an interlude, something that will be over; but it’s our life. When I’m his age and I look back on my youth, that’s what it will be.

  Of course he’s never seen the baby boy. Only the photographs my mother brings back. She tells him the infant looks like him, just as I did when I was born, she says. It already has quite marked eyebrows. But he says babies look like other babies. The lover wants to acknowledge no paternity, neither for me nor his grandchild; unfortunate about the eyebrows …and my mother so innocently proud of the proof of succession, something no other woman of his can take away from her. Maybe it’s not so much innocence: perhaps women really want men only to supply them with children; when that biological function has been fulfilled down to the second generation, and they themselves can’t bear children any more (my mother must be close to that stage now? Like Baby, I always think of her as young) they don’t need us. I realize I don’t know enough about women. It’s not a subject of instruction he’s keen to pass on.

  My mother goes to visit Baby and the little boy in Lusaka often. Of course—she said ‘I need to be able to go back’. Before the birth she was busy knitting and sewing while he was out at his meetings and ‘meetings’ in the evenings. She pinned the shapes of small garments to the padded ironing board and pressed them under a damp cloth; the smell of warm wool steamed up. Sometimes I was studying in the kitchen to keep her company. There was no-one to collect the pins with the horseshoe magnet.

  She went to Lusaka once more before the child was born, and again for the birth. She has no trouble with the authorities; why should they harass the poor woman: they did search her luggage at Jan Smuts airport on that third exit—she was, after all, Sonny’s wife—and how foolish they must have felt to have their counter strewn with her beautifully-made baby clothes, emblems of embroidered rabbits instead of subversive documents, white and blue ribbons in place of the colours of a banned political organization. She said they were very nice to her; congratulated her on being about to become an ouma. My father remarked, yes, sentimentality is the obverse side of thuggery. He knows that from his prison days. The doctor for whom my mother works is most understanding and accommodating—he doesn’t seem to object to her taking frequent absences from the surgery. I suppose it must be unpaid leave; but my mother is used to managing with little money, she doesn’t skimp us, in the household, and yet apparently she is able to save enough for the airfares. I suppose that’s why she doesn’t look like she used to—it’s not only that hair, now—she doesn’t dress with the care she did, goes off on these trips to my sister in pants and flat shoes, the clothes and toys for the little boy stuffed into my duffel bag. When she comes back she doesn’t ask how we—I’ve managed. And she seems to have made more friends here; friends of her own, not my father’s with whom she was always on the fringe. She’s quite often out when I arrive home and her day’s work at the surgery is over. The other evening, he came in and I heard him call out from the kitchen as he hasn’t done for I don’t know how long: Aila? Aila?

  But he was mistaken; he’s lost the instinct for sensing my mother’s presence in some other room. They were empty. She was not there. Not for him, not for me.

  As Sonny believed he had found in Hannah the only friend he ever had, so he had believed he had found in the risks of liberation, on public platforms and at clandestine meetings, in prison, the only comrades he had ever had. If that friendship meant for him the blessed reception of sensuality as part of intelligence, then that comradeship meant he and his colleagues in common faith would live or die together. They did not speak each other’s names under interrogation. Since they had been equal to that, no other form of betrayal could find a crack to enter between them.

  Once a great Shakespearean reader, reverent amateur of the power of words, Sonny must have known that if a term is coined it creates a self-fulfilling possibility and at the same time provides a formulation for dealing with it. ‘Disaffected’ was coined in political jargon to handle, with prophylactic gloves, the kind of men who came to see him one night when he was alone in the house. He turned them away; as he was certain others would. They were best left to fizzle out through lack of notice taken of them; the acknowledgement of any kind of ‘disaffection’ in the movement was merely a means of letting the government smell blood. Individuals discussed such visits in confidence, they were known about; the subject was not on the agenda of the executive. But several of those night visitors sat blandly on that executive. Perhaps they were awaiting a more propitious time to act again, rather than affirming contrite submission, a lapse—just once—accepted by the leadership as such. These options in themselves caused conflict. Some thought the men ought to be talked to, privately, by strong personalities; they needed to be dealt with, have it made clear to them, once again, that unity and no other was the condition of resistance—with the underlying message that they didn’t stand a chance of getting away with anything they had in mind. Some felt this must be managed with the greatest care, they mustn’t feel in danger of expulsion anyway—it would encourage them to pre-empt and make a face-saving announcement of a split. And of course the disaffected cabal scented the sweat of this indecision and moved to take advantage of it. They lobbied (that inappropriate te
rm for a movement that came into being because its entire great constituency was excluded from parliament) among the other executive members where they saw concern for caution might become support. There were leaks interpreted by the press: LEADERSHIP’S BREAKING BRANCH—THE OLD GUARD HANGS ON.

  Sonny had read warning signs for a long time; somehow partly misread. Before Lesotho; that man asleep in the bed close to the earth; before the return with news from Lusaka—months ago Sonny had talked over with Hannah the peculiar attitude of a comrade with whom he had always been in close accord. —‘All smiles, and the next thing, you’ve got a palace revolution.’ —He had said it without knowing fully what he said. And Hannah, she’d reassured that any potential troublemakers would have to believe they could capture the executive before they could attempt anything. Neither he nor she had thought they already might be convinced of success. However well a human being is known, it is never known what is moving in him towards a decisive act, something ‘out of character’, it’s not to be seen how it is slowly coming about, what is preparing for it: the turning aside, the betrayal. You run away and leave the dying man. Just once.

  Sonny had to accept that disaffection wasn’t going to fizzle out. The learning process is endless. One of the fellows (as he still, sometimes, in schoolmaster brotherliness, privately thought of his comrades) who had been in detention with him was now part of the palace revolution. It was incredible; a wound in Sonny’s side. This was one of the comrades Hannah had visited.

  —And he used to write such good letters, so spirited—

  —You wrote to him, too?—

  —Yes, to everyone, it’s our policy, keeping in touch as much as possible. You know that.—

  Sermons in stones, and good in everything.