My Son's Story

by Nadine Gordimer

  Although Sonny, with his credentials and his articulacy, would have been many people’s choice to ‘discipline’ the disaffected individuals, it was decided that anyone who had been approached by them was ruled out for the task. The candidates must be among those who had not already shown these men the door. The meeting-ground must not be that of assumed hostility. But he was in caucus meetings with trade union leaders and a delegate to secret meetings with other affiliated radical groups, to discuss their support in the matter. Between meetings and travelling from centre to centre around the country for consultation there were the private-within-private obligations to be available to this one or that who must speak to him alone; the rumours to be considered, the reports coming from those on the other side who were in fact acting as informers for the movement; and the suspicion, to be compared, that this one or that was spying on the movement’s deliberations for relay to the disaffected. He scarcely had time or mind to fulfil his other responsibilities—the attention owed to what he’d taken on for himself, the two establishments he kept up, the home and the cottage. Fortunately Aila was kept busy either with preparations for her visits to see her grandchild or actually was away on such a visit, and Hannah knew what priorities were. So Aila did not seem to notice when he forgot the date she was to be off again and he looked blank, a moment, when she came into the kitchen with the boy behind her carrying her luggage, to say goodbye.

  —What time’s your plane? I’ll take you to the airport.—

  No, there was Will, Will was driving her, he’d bring the car straight back.—You’re sure you can manage without it for now?—Aila’s usual considerateness made him suddenly remember she must have asked him the previous night if this would inconvenience him; she knew he was hard-pressed although he did not tell her much.

  At the cottage, after a few days’ absence, he arrived for an hour; at one in the morning Hannah woke instantly to hear the car stop in the lane and flew stumbling to the door. He was in a state of high tension from talk and exhaustion, and the touch of her sleep-hot skin made him start and shudder. His eye-sockets were purple as if from a blow. Don’t talk, don’t talk any more, Hannah said, although she was the one he talked to, she was the one with whom he shared what there was to live for outside self, she was the one friend he ever had. They quickly made love—no, he fucked her, it was all he had left in him to expend. And then he had to get dressed and go; to put in an appearance for his son, at breakfast, to prepare himself with some rest for the decisions of another day. If he could get to sleep; But then begins a journey in my head, to work my mind. The old consolation of fine words become a taunt.

  Why was he approached that night?

  How could he ever have imagined anyone could construe something significant out of that unexpected and insulting visit?

  But it actually was remarked to him: Why you?

  Said lightly. He could not believe the obvious implication, unsaid: what is there about you that made you seem a possibility? There must have been something, why else …? The irreproachable comrade, the popular Sonny …not such clean hands, after all? Nobody—sometimes not even those who repeated these things, murmur to murmur—knew where they came from; whether from buried malice within themselves, churned up in the mud of uncertainty and suspicion fear of disaffection created, or whether discreetly dropped by the enemy—which was no longer definitively only the government, the police, the army, but also the disaffected; and maybe these last were allied?

  Why him?

  How was it possible those people should have had the presumption to come to him? What made them think they could? Now it was no longer a simple matter of showing them the door. The idea that he had ever opened it to them filled him with dismayed revulsion. The idea that his comrade prisoners of conscience could expect him to ask himself such a question prised at the wound in his side.

  —There are some whose trust I’d have laid my life on, but who don’t dismiss these things, raise no objections …can you credit it?—He had to find time to talk to Hannah, needed to talk to Hannah.

  —The bastards.—Blood showed patchy in her cheeks, bright blue tears stood in her eyes, she was blowzy with anger.

  He shook his head at the uselessness.—I’d have put my head on a block for them, they’d never … they’re the best …—

  —No, I mean those others—don’t you see—they want to set you at each other’s throats. They want you to discredit each other, make trouble among yourselves. You’ve got to put a stop to it.—

  —‘Not such clean hands, after all’—

  —You must have it out. Sonny?—

  —I suppose so. But to me … to have to admit that such things are possible among us—

  She wondered whether her touch would humiliate him; whether he needed to close off all his resources to feel intact, unreachable by tenderness as well as assault. But she took his hand and felt the bones, one by one. –No-one who really matters can doubt your integrity for a moment. You know that.—

  He had it out with the top leadership; they discussed how best it should be dealt with and chose a method that showed their unquestioned confidence in and value placed on him. For a time they kept him at their side in the most important of discussions and displayed him as privy to critical decisions, even if these had been made without him. He ignored his wound in fervent devotion to see unity restored, purpose made whole again.

  I have a little girl of my own. ‘Little’ not because she’s physically small—although she is, she’s about the same build as my mother—but in the sense the adjective is often used. She’s not important—I don’t go in for great loves. She’s a nice enough little thing, very fond of me and I’m quite fond of her. I sleep with her at her place, on the couch in the sitting-room when her parents are out, or sometimes in the room a friend of hers lends her.

  Just like Dad. My sex life has no home.

  It’s a sweet and easy experience she takes very seriously. She’s intelligent (don’t worry, I wouldn’t take up with an uneducated girl …) and we go to the movies and the progressive theatre I’ve been brought up to have a taste for, when we can afford to. Her salary as a computer operator would be adequate to support us in a small flat, although I’m still a student and earn only from part-time work, and she keeps suggesting this. Then we can sleep the whole night together, she says, innocently awed. But I can’t leave my mother alone, and because my mother counts on me to be there with him when she’s away, I can’t leave him.

  The little girl is proud of being the girl-friend of someone in our family. I know she tells everybody I’m the famous Sonny’s son; her parents ‘trust me’ with her because they are impressed by the high moral standards of a family who live for others; frightened to death to participate in liberation politics themselves, they belong to the people who see ‘Sonny’ as a kind of hero and I suppose always will; although I notice lately that among his peers he seems to count for less than he used to. The big shots in the movement don’t come round for private talks so often. I have the impression he’s being eased aside; don’t know why, and he wouldn’t talk to me about it anyway. He’s selective; it’s not the sort of secret it suits him to share with me. I suppose in politics as with everything else: you have your day, and then it’s over, someone else’s turn. And that, again, isn’t something he’s good at accepting.

  I can see my mother’s pleased about the little girl. I wouldn’t sleep with her in our house even when there’s the opportunity, my mother in Lusaka and he in bed on the floor in that love-nest, but I’ve brought her home for tea. I knew my mother would like that; it’s the way things used to be, ought to be, for her. And she was quite like she used to be, before; she had put on stockings and high-heeled shoes.—Oh your mum’s beautiful—My girl was enchanted.

  —Was. When she still had her long hair.—

  The two females at once reached some unspoken accord. The little girl instinctively knows my mother would like to see me—at least one of her children—‘settled�
� with a conventional domestic life, nearby. And hang liberation, eh. Live in the interstices that were once good enough for her and her husband, when they were young; and these are wider, more comfortable, now, no more Benoni-son-of-sorrow ghetto, but illegal occupation of a house in a white area, cinemas open to all. Good enough for me, the stay-at-home, the disappointment (to him) and the mama’s boy (to her). She, too, has a role for me: tame Will keeps the home fires burning while noble Sonny and Baby defend the freedom of the people.

  I said to her when I brought the results of my first-year studies—distinctions all the way—What am I doing this for? Who’s going to employ a business-school graduate in a revolution? —And I laughed. So she took it as a joke.—It’s wonderful you’ve done so well, Will.—

  —Oh yes, my father will be proud of me.—

  She was looking at me, unguarded for a second, her eyes then quickly lowered, a faint twitch in the left lid. I shouldn’t have said it; it was the nearest we’ve ever come—to what? Betraying him? I don’t know what sense there is in this compact, but I see she still wants it observed although the consolation of the grandchild, the visits to Baby—a kind of life of her own—have somehow brought her to terms with what she must feel about her husband.

  But I was serious; fed up.—Why should I go on living here as if it’s all right to make a nice little corner for yourself—(I didn’t say ‘with a nice little girl’.)

  She was watching my lips as if she couldn’t believe what came from them. Her alarm made her shrink and age, just as pleasure at the tea-party with a prospective daughter-in-law had made her soften youthfully.—We’re going to need qualified people. Bush fighters won’t win the economic war.—

  Where does my mother get that kind of jargon? From him, no doubt; or picked up along with the baby-talk in homely visits to Lusaka. It’s not her turn of phrase. She and I don’t communicate like that.

  —You’re valuable, Will.—

  I know what she’s saying: don’t leave. Don’t leave me. Don’t leave us. She won’t let me fight. For my people. For my freedom.

  I’ve never thought there was any guile in my mother but I suppose she’s a woman, after all, some sort of sister to my father’s blonde, since he’s fancied them both. And circumstances have brought out the ability in her, as she’s been changed in other ways. Perhaps to show me how she depends on me she’s taken lately to asking me to drive her around (I’ve traded in that bike and bought a ‘nice little’ Japanese car second-hand because the girl’s parents wouldn’t let her ride clinging to my back). She’s going to meet a friend or one of the doctor’s patients has invited her to visit—as I remarked, she’s become more independent of my father, in her simple way. I drop her at a shopping centre or a street corner convenient for me to turn back. She says she’s only a step or two away from her destination, it’s not worthwhile to go right up to the entrance. So she doesn’t press the dependency too far; it’s carefully calculated. She doesn’t need me to come and fetch her home again—there’s a bus, or the friend will drive her, she assures. Poor woman, I’ve got the message. Once when my way was blocked by a truck just as I was about to turn the corner, unobserved I saw her walking not up the street on the side she’d said she was going, but round the opposite corner in a different direction. She might have mistaken the address; but it also crossed my mind that the whole outing was a pathetic lie, she had no friend, no planned visit, she just wanted to show me she cannot live with him, without me.

  Not all the perfumes of Arabia.

  Why him?

  The question came back again and again, acid burning in Sonny’s breast. It was not quite the same question. New, different, now. Not as if he were to have been the only one. Several comrades were visited that night, or some other night. He knew, because he and they had compared notes privately before taking the matter to the executive. But the suspicion, that had had to be dispelled by a show of leadership, had been set in circulation against him, alone. Why him? Why should it find substance, some confirmation in comrades’ minds? There was no suggestion that this could take place in relation to the others who had been approached by the disaffected. Unreliable. What shadow had been cast, from where? Behind him, around him; all turned in his mind and burned in that place under his breast-bone. Not even Hannah’s soft padded hand on him could still it.

  Hannah. They knew about Hannah. They knew what had been going on a long time, now, since prison—they were men, some of them lovers of women—which means they took their chances when these presented themselves. But he was not a lover of women, in that accepted sense—a weekend or a night when a woman looks at you in a certain way in another city, and you come home and forget about her. Revolutionaries, activists, are whole men and women; only human. Such marginal encounters have nothing to do with dedication and dependability.

  But Sonny never had been that kind of man. There were no flattering flirtations or one-night peccadillos of manhood to ignore, in his record. He lived in intricate balance an apparently permanent double life. Seriously; he managed it and evidently would not relinquish it. They knew what a good wife for a revolutionary Aila was. And they all knew who the woman was. Useful. She was not afraid of police and prisons, danger by association. One of themselves, in a way. But only in a way; not directly in the movement, certainly not acceptable as party to deliberations, decisions and tactics, and therefore not—most important—subject to discipline. He knew that. Sonny, who had been the most disciplined of men, knew that about her, however close he allowed her to come. And to come close to him was to come close to the movement. He knew he was responsible for that; and of course he was aware they knew it.

  He began to discern a shadow cast from Hannah. His needing Hannah. He had not told his peers—who had shown their confidence vested in him—about the man he had found sleeping on her stoep, the man she sent with an intimate password he couldn’t refuse to acknowledge, whom he fed and guarded—yes!—not knowing who he was or what he was doing, some piece of adventurism, probably, Hannah had been deceived into.

  And they knew about it; that was the explanation. He had lent himself to an action—some sort of mission that his movement had not authorized, about which it had not been informed. Some—the disaffected—knew, and that was why they thought it possible to approach him. And others knew about it, as well as that the approach of the disaffected had taken place.

  So why not a triple life? If a man of his old and proven integrity could withhold information from the movement to which total dedication was due, loyalty was the letter of faith, he also might be vulnerable—open, like a wound—to disaffection.

  Better to be vile than vile esteemed, when not to be receives reproach of being.

  He hated to have coming up at him these tags from an old habit of pedantry; useless, useless to him. In a schoolteacher’s safe small life, aphorisms summed up so pleasingly dangers that were never going to have to be lived. There is no elegance in the actuality—the distress of calumny and self-betrayal, difficult to disentangle.

  He was reinstated. Yes. But that that term should ever have had to be used in reference to Sonny! Nothing to be proved or disproved against him, no charges, a shadow. Yet reinstated as the others, the disaffected group, were, as if he were in the same category. Perhaps nobody other than himself saw it that way. Leadership held its hand over him; that was enough. Whereas with the disaffected there was a deal. He was present at caucus meetings where the terms to be offered for the sake of unity were discussed. But he contributed nothing. He, who always had had such clear and influential opinions, leaning forward on his hands, his eyes seeming to gather and synthesize the elements of a decision diffused among voices and motives, before he would speak—he was not ‘party to’ the bargaining under which the disaffected were dealt with. His comrade in the Chair deferred to him with a glance, now and then, taking off his glasses to make the space of a pause seem to be for this trivial purpose. An old friend; they had exercised in a prison yard together. Every time he d
id feel the urge to intervene with an opinion, an impulse of irrational anger swamped it, but that business was over and done with, nobody wanted to hear accusations, now. Self, self; since when was he obsessed with self. But it was their fault, his comrades sitting where their lives and sometimes deaths were in each other’s hands in this abandoned warehouse space, enclosed by eye-level clapboard according to someone’s confused idea that all meeting places, however diverse their purposes, were businessmen’s offices and boardrooms. The empty water cooler stood as the neglected fish tank did in the Benoni yard when Will and Baby let their pets die …the anger was controlled, his attention wandered: self, self. Suspend them now, someone was saying, they can’t come and sit here with us!

  —Let them go back to the rank and file, man … What do they think.—A small black man with the pock-marks of poverty and the scars of warders’ punches spat the match from the corner of his mouth.

  —Most of them are the rank and file, so?—

  —No, no, only three. The other two are exec members.—

  —Comrade Chair …Comrade Chair …can I just …—

  —Caleb is the only one we see. The other—he hasn’t attended a meeting for months.—

  —On a mission!—

  There was laughter, and private exchanges.—What sort of people are we sending around? Did you hear that?——Some mission …he goes about claiming …I’m telling you——Makes statements supposed to come from us—

  They had their break from tension and then were rapped to order.—This is not a circus, comrades.—

  One who always could be counted on to hold the floor as if he were eyeing in a mirror his plump handsome face, himself his own appreciative audience, began a prepared speech.

  —Comrades …we are facing a grave crisis whose ultimate consequences we may not foresee … the forces of democratic action are threatened from within … this Trojan horse, can it be stabled … I ask you … challenge … is it much different from the truck appearing innocently to be carrying its load of cold drinks, that attracted our children into the street and gave the fascists who were hidden with their guns behind the crates a chance to shoot our children down …Are we to watch our words and stick out our necks to the knives of potential traitors here in this place where we meet to put our minds and hearts in the struggle …are we to sit with Judas in our midst … I say, and I dare to speak in the name of our masses, who sacrifice their bread in strike action, who risk the roof over their heads in rent boycotts, our comrade workers who sweat and toil in the dark of the mines …let us cast out these betrayers of the people’s trust, the unity that is our strength, let them do what they will, but we cannot compromise the struggle that is sacred to us—