My Son's Story

by Nadine Gordimer

  Sonny disentangled himself gently from her and sat up.—How did all this come about? How do they know about you?—

  —Apparently a recommendation from the International Commission of Jurists. I had no idea.—

  He nodded slowly; he was rubbing his naked arms, crossed over against himself.—Addis … Eritrea, Sudan, Lebanon. God knows where, there are new camps every day, new populations wandering homeless.—

  —Mozambique.—She added somewhere nearer by, within reach of him.

  He turned and gazed down at her. She kept quite still in her shelter of blonde hair, a straggling wisp sweaty from love-making streaking one cheek. But Sonny only smiled, the smile that lingered and turned into that painful grin of his he couldn’t relax.—A wonderful opportunity, my Hannah. An honour to be chosen.—

  —Offered.—

  —No; chosen.—

  —I’ve just left it. I haven’t even replied … they’ve written again. By courier.—

  —Of course. They want you. Highly recommended.—

  —Lie down, I can’t talk to your back … please.—

  He sank beside her. They were stretched out like two figures on a tomb commemorating a faithful life together. She took his hand.—I don’t know what to say to them. I mean, what can I do … I’m … I’ve got my work here—

  —They know about that, don’t they. They know how good at that kind of thing you are; that’s why. They know you’re capable of something … more … bigger … important.—

  —Nothing’s more important than what’s happening here. For me.—

  —You don’t know what to say to them.—

  —No. I don’t. I just don’t know.—

  —You’ve thought about it.—

  —Yes, in a way. I haven’t really …it doesn’t seem to be something I can take in—

  —But you’ve thought about it.—

  —What it would mean—yes.—He had drawn it out of her, he was making her face what she had not, did not want to.

  She could not turn to him the fatuous, what do you think?

  She got out of bed and padded barefoot into the kitchen, the familiar sight of the Van Gogh sunflowers, to make some coffee. She supposed he would have to go, soon; he always had to go. She did not return to the room while the water was boiling; she left him alone there, god knows what he was thinking—but she knew what it was he was thinking, she did not want to see it. She picked the dead leaves off the pot of oregano growing on the windowsill. There was the whoosh of the lavatory cistern releasing its content; he had used the bathroom, and she found this reassuring—life going on humbly with its small demands of the body.

  She brought in two mugs of coffee. He was back in the bed.

  —I wish they’d never asked me.—

  I was the one to open the door again.

  I actually heard them before they hammered on it. I woke and knew immediately what was coming with the screech of the gate and the tramping up the concrete path he laid for my mother so we wouldn’t trail mud onto the stoep. It’s as if there’s a setting in my brain like a wake-up call programmed on a radio clock.

  I got up and without even turning on the light went down the passage and unlocked the door with a flourish.

  —He’s not here.—

  Within three silhouettes I made out a pale blur and two dark blanks—a white officer, and the others our kind. One of them shone his torch at my face:—Dis net die seun, man.—

  —You want to come and search? My father’s not here. I don’t know where he is, so no good asking.—

  One of them pressed the switch of the stoep light, the darkness whisked from them—the officer in uniform and the other two in their kind of drag, dressed in jeans and split running shoes to look like disco-goers instead of fuzz. The white was young but had false teeth, I saw when he smiled at my cockiness to show he was used to the lack of respectful fear you can expect from the families of men like my father. He spoke in Afrikaans. —But you know where your mother is, hey—go and call your mother.—

  And he spelled out the full name, maiden and married.

  My heart began to thunder up a troop of wild beasts in my chest.—She doesn’t know, either.—

  The white repeated my mother’s names.

  I had to believe they didn’t believe me, they wanted her only to question her about him, the galloping confusion under my ribs let loose childish impulses to shut the door against them, to yell to her, help me, save me. Me? Him? They had not come for Sonny, they came for her. At my back I heard her approaching from her bedroom and I could see her before I saw her, the flowered dressing-gown with her shiny black plait down her back.

  She pushed gently past me as she really is. A short towelling gown and a rough cap of chemically-dulled hair, two stoic lines from nose to mouth that have changed her smile. She answered to her names, the one she had from her family before she married him and the one she took on with everything else that has come from him. I began to shout and she shushed me, pressing my shoulder and signalling her hand towards her mouth as if I could understand only gestures in which I suppose she had communicated with me long before I could understand speech. I followed her back to the entrance hall where—my god, what was she doing, she was taking out of our junk cupboard the carryall she used to keep packed for my father, she took it into the bedroom and started putting her hand-cream hairbrush Kleenex—I shouted, at last, at last: The bastard! That bastard, what has he done now! What has he done to get you inside! I’ll kill him, I tell you when he walks in that kitchen door again I’ll kill him!

  She was moving her head, moving her head calmingly at me as she packed her bag, you’d have thought she was about to go on a trip to see Baby and the grandchild. She turned towards me, pleading, modest.—Will … I have to get dressed …—

  God knows what they are going to do to her; but a son cannot look upon his mother’s nakedness.

  When they had taken her away I thrust myself into a pair of pants and ran from the house that streamed light and drove the fastest I could get out of a beat-up second-hand car to that cottage. The dogs from the main house followed me bounding and snarling across the grass and I tore at shrubs and threw branches at them. I was barefoot and they snapped at my calves as I raced to the steps. Now it’s my turn to hammer. I flung back the broken screen door and beat upon the wooden one with both fists. I didn’t call on my father; Sonny, I bellowed, Sonny. Sonny. Sonny. Sonny. There was no-one there. I went on beating at the door and was disgusted to find my fists, my face wet. For the second time, first as a youth with a breaking voice, now as a man, I wept.

  Lights went on in the main house and there were voices above the howling and barking frenzy of the dogs. I ran shit-scared through the thickest and darkest part of the garden, gleam of a fish-pond, a black intruder pursued by a property owner, tried the fence, fell back, made it a second time and as my head must have become visible against the sky, a bullet cracked past me.

  I went to kill him that night.

  I was the one who opened the door to her jailers. I was the one who could have died.

  It was the weekend of reconciliation.

  Sonny and his blonde woman went back to the resort rondavel among the orange blossom. To be away somewhere, once more, to have whole nights together; it was a pause clutched at out of what was pressing them along, breaking in upon them in the timelessness of that one room. Hannah’s idea—Hannah’s plan; once she sensed he knew she would be the United Nations High Commission’s Regional Representative on the vast continent of Africa everything became insidious between them, guilt and fear and regret taught her guile to save her skin from the corrosion of his pain: she could not go, she could not; while she knew she would. She wheedled him into finding a pretext to be away from home for two days. Urgent meetings at national level in some other part of the country? He had somehow always managed to arrange these trips so that his family believed he was with his comrades, and his comrades believed he had some unavoidable domestic ob
ligation meriting a weekend to himself. They had always got away with it. And while she spoke this vulgar phrase she heard in her own ears the cynical deception of any common sexual encounter; not for them. And the ‘always’ could be construed to refer obliquely to the fact that lately—unlike ‘always’—it could not be taken for granted he would be included in important discussions ‘at national level’.

  Where should they go?

  —Rustenburg?—

  She suggested this as if at the same time quickly abandoning the possibility. It was where they had experienced their most intense happiness together; but it was also the place from which he had come home to find his daughter had tried to kill herself.

  They looked at each other searchingly, awkward. Both, each for their own reasons, were tempted to go back where the scent of orange blossom had been a heady oxygen.

  She made it possible with a rational evasion that would not recognize there was an emotional reason of another kind which might make him shudder at returning to that place.—It’s nearby.—As if the long drives they had taken were not a particular intimate way of being together, travelling in a contained space, neither here nor there where other ties existed.

  So Sonny told the necessary lies. To Aila, who could not have imagined he would lie to her. To his comrades, who seldom had urgent need of him, now, and were unlikely to try to contact him at home. Aila reassured him that Will would lend her his car for her weekend plans. He took the briefcase and left. She had kissed him on the cheek; he put his hand to the place as to a nick made when shaving, while he drove to pick up Hannah.

  A gust of gaiety overcame Sonny and Hannah on the drive. Theirs was a splendid day with the sheen of last night’s rain on the veld grass and the great glossy caves of wild mahogany trees the road dipped under as they descended to a sub-tropical altitude. She fed him dried apricots and once he pretended to give her fingers a nip. He was reminded, passing a railway siding, that once he took a bunch of kids camping in this area. —Tell me.—The old desire to have known the conscientious schoolmaster surfaced, only too ready to come to life in her. —What a disaster. There was a washaway, I herded them together at this siding hoping to get them onto a train. We stood there for hours in torrential rain and when a train came it was for whites and the driver wouldn’t let us on.—He laughed at the vision of himself.—The kids were wet as seals. They took it as a great adventure.—

  —Well, at least that wouldn’t happen now.—

  No, the trains on this route were no longer segregated, and there was no law, any longer, against a man of his kind and a woman of her kind sharing a bed. The woman at the reception desk had been trained to make guests feel welcomed with a personal touch.—Weren’t you with us here before, sir?—

  He was signing the register with her grandfather’s surname, their pseudonym as a couple.—No.—

  —Funny … but so many people come back to us again and again …—

  Yes, no law against such a couple, now, but by tradition the combination continues to be something of a shock, even if it has to be dismissed for business reasons.

  —No—He was aware of Hannah’s eyes on his back as he wrote the date in the register; he felt shame (and the wrongness of feeling shame, as if it somehow could be read as an apology for being himself) on behalf of both of them for this lie. Only this lie.

  She wanted to tell him to ask for the bungalow they had before but couldn’t in view of the denial they had ever been there. The one they were allotted was much the same; she drew back the curtains and flung open the windows to let out the smell of insect repellent.—It’s that stuff that made you wheeze in the middle of the night.—He did not let the opportunity of the reference slip.—It was all right. We got up and went for a walk just as we were, the stars were already low and it was so lovely and cool.—What was he going to get her to say: I love you Sonny, I love you so much—but she’s like Aila, now, she can’t say it. He lay on the bed and closed one eye, his signal that he would take a nap.—Come on. Don’t be lazy. Come and swim with me.—They butted and raced each other under water, and it was impossible not to laugh. Later they lay on the bed companionably with the heat of the afternoon shut out, he reading and she with the headphones of her miniature cassette player (your diadem, he called it) buried in her hair tarnished by wet and springing back like grapevine tendrils dried round his absently twirling fingers. Every now and then, without speaking, she would suddenly take off the headphones and put one to his ear, closing her eyes and tightening her soft mouth in ravishment at what she had been listening to.—What is it?——Concerto for mandolins, Vivaldi. Raindrop music, that slow movement.—She snuggled back into her headphones. But when he laid open on his chest the file of papers, notes and speeches he was reading and she saw he wanted to talk she dropped the headphones like a necklace beneath her chin.

  —It worries me more and more.—The back of his hand fell on the dossier.—These young people seem to grind on, doctrinaire in the old style, the old catchwords, while the socialist world—our model—the real socialist world, it’s changed so much. People there have fought and died to get rid of most of the means the young comrades are still starry-eyed about using after liberation. We have the principle we must be led by the people … right, and it’s the masses in Eastern Europe who’ve overthrown the regimes that were supposed to be led by them! It’s the people’s choice and will! How can we not recognize that? Not trust them? Do we really want to ‘achieve’ policies these uprisings prove to have perpetuated misery and poverty? When those who’ve lived with them are making them obsolete?—

  —You’re talking about the unemployed, the camp-followers—the school-boycott generation, going on at gatherings …? And you owe them so much they must be given the platform … Well, and yes, it’s true, there’re also a few whites, the fossilized Stalinists—

  —No, no. Even among us … the needle jumps back and you hear the same record. And of course it’s still what works best with crowds. We’re not innocent of using it … particularly with the youth and the workers. It’s still what seems to them the answer to their frustrations. The secular promised land. What they want to hear. So … And there’re still fellows here who, when they’re talking about giving the land back to the people, mean some kind of forced collectives. It doesn’t matter to them that these have been abandoned everywhere because they don’t work—people don’t work productively in that structure. It’s been proved over seventy hard years! Doesn’t that mean anything? And the others, shaking their heads because the Constitutional Guidelines update the Freedom Charter—we’ve moved on, thirty-five years since Freedom Square, for god’s sake—but they sneer sell-out because there’s recognition of private property along with land redistribution, a mixed economy with nationalization. So they’re outraged that anyone should be allowed to own a family home. Still dreaming our people’s democracy will be able through god knows what miracle—you tell me!—to provide state garden suburbs for the workers, when no other regime has succeeded in this, not one, when it’s been the great failure of socialism we ought to have the confidence to admit if we want to live as socialists of the twenty-first century. Because that’s what we already should be. The twentieth’s thinking is the past. Finished. Viva, viva socialism. Which one? Which one are we shouting about? The dead one? We’ll take the best of it and move on. Must. Don’t they see, won’t they see? The Soviets, the whole of Eastern Europe, even China—there’s a new assessment—yes, that’s what comes out of the uprisings, isn’t it, Hannah, that’s what it really is, quite scientific enough, on the analysis of concrete evidence!—it’s a whole new understanding of our human needs and how to go about trying to realize them. And it’s not what the capitalist world rubs its hands over, it’s not what they think; we’re not being taken over. It’s not revisionism—but here you get that old parrot accusation.—

  She stirred beside him.—Change the way they think …again. I don’t know … It’s not so long since you learnt to change the id
ea you had of yourselves as powerless against whites. The old Left did it, by god! Thank god. Only the old Left. Now new realities to be accepted … It’s going to be hard for many, looked at from here. It means the loss of absolutes—you know what I mean? I’m a missionary’s granddaughter … It makes people feel insecure. You can screw up the courage to do what you have to do to get rid of the old structures that hold you down if you can believe there’s a paradise on the other side. You die for freedom only if there’s the political equivalent of eternal life to come—which is liberation as promised in the old socialist writ, not in some compromise with a mixed economy, people with money—whites, and bourgeois blacks!—still owning property on land the whites stole by conquest! That’s how it will seem!—

  —But the writ’s being rewritten! That’s the point! People have been willing to die now for that. We’ve got to wake up and realize it, if it’s to mean feeding and housing and educating our people in freedom! Giving the generations of uprooted people and refugees somewhere to live instead of somewhere to run from—

  There.

  The reference lay between them like the name of the recently dead brought up tactlessly before the bereaved. I could have cut my tongue out, the offender says, not meaning it, because reference to the loss is something those concerned will have to accustom themselves to, anyway.

  Hannah broke in quickly.—Is this being taken up with the cadres?—

  —Not as it should be. No. There’s no interest in what’s happening outside. Except at the top—leadership—of course. Here and outside, negotiations go on on the basis that the world’s changed. How else. But we keep it to ourselves. No-one wants to talk about it except insofar as it affects our allies’ attitude towards our struggle. With the cold war melted down, will they still see our enemies, here, as theirs? There’s no real open debate on what else the big changes outside mean to our ideological thinking. Nothing! We’re afraid to talk about it for fear it weakens our hold on people. Afraid that if we can’t offer the old socialist paradise in exchange for the capitalist hell here, we’ll have turned traitor to our brothers!—