My Son's Story

by Nadine Gordimer

Father-knows-best. Late, late at night, late in our lives and she’s not coming back, he somehow knows she’s not coming back—what right does he think he has to keep something from me?

  I wanted to yell at him to keep his hands still.

  —You know what’s happened to her. Where is she? Tell me.—

  —I don’t know, Will, I’m telling you, I don’t know where she is. I just don’t know.—

  Ah yes. The less you know, the better; that’s the way we protect one another, I ought to know that, I’d know that if I were one of them. He was telling me the truth.

  We went to bed, he and I. He left the door of their bedroom open and so did I mine, I don’t know what for. We lay apart in the dark following imaginary passages of Aila through the night, placing her where she might be—both of us, I’m sure. I fell asleep towards dawn because I’m young but I don’t suppose he slept at all.

  A young girl came early in the morning. She had purplepink painted lips and nails and she wore white plastic boots, a smart little garment-factory girl on her way to work. Any neighbourly informers watching the house would have thought her one of the girl-friends of the son, she looked exactly the kind of girl they believe the son of our kind of people would be attracted to. Her long nails and her bangles clicked as she scrabbled for the note in her bag and gave it to my father. In the midst of the strain and tension of those moments there was an incongruous aside, in my feelings; pride in the fact of the unguessed-at commitment of our people to the struggle, hidden under this cheap appearance. Whites don’t know what they’re seeing when they look at us; at her, at the black women from the country knitting jerseys for sale on the city pavements, at the black combi drivers taking over the streets, the miners in their NUM T-shirts; at my sister, Baby, at Aila, my mother. I want to tell them.

  The note was from one of my father’s comrades in the leadership. It asked him to come to a certain house. I stayed behind to be home when the police came to look for her. Of course; I was the one who opened the door to them. But she wasn’t there. Another time, my mother had gone away and never come back. Now Aila is gone, and she won’t come back until everything here is changed, there is air, she will not be judged by the laws white men made for us, she will not live across the veld in a ghetto or be an illegal tenant in a white man’s street like this one, where the white neighbours have come out to watch—the women with their arms crossed over their breasts, lips drawn back in salacious expectation, the frowning men with their hands dangling—a police van standing at the gate of this house and the police with their guns and dogs on the stoep.

  The leadership thought it best not to involve Sonny in the decision that Aila should estreat bail and leave the country. There was the chance that once her disappearance was discovered he would be detained again, to be questioned about her. This way, at least he could not be proved to have facilitated his wife’s escape.

  So she did not need him, even for that.

  He told his son it was leadership’s decision she should go because the case against her was very serious and in the course of evidence important information about the movement might be revealed. There were infiltrators to the movement involved, who would turn State witnesses under indemnity. Aila had performed her missions commendably, but now her cover was blown. Her name would be honoured, from now on, in the movement inside and outside the country—where she could still be active. Dr Jasood regarded the loss of his money as a contribution to the struggle. When Sonny went with his son Will to thank Aila’s old employer, he continued to write some report on a patient while he spoke.—She is worth more than ten thousand rands to us. God bless her.—

  There was news of Aila after a while. It came through a third or fourth person, probably someone like she had been, who appeared to be moving innocently between countries. Sonny applied for a passport so that he might have a chance to visit her sometime; see Baby, and his grandchild. But the passport was refused, not unexpectedly, although one of his comrades remarked—Can’t see why he shouldn’t have a good chance of getting one, now.—

  The comment stayed with him long after he was resigned to the disappointment over the passport. It was the echo of common acceptance that the keepers of police files would find he no longer counted as particularly representative of the danger of the movement, to them. It is the enemy—the police, the Ministers of Law and Order and Justice—who decides who the leaders of the people are; it is the measure of the attention, the hounding and harassment you receive, that makes you ‘Sonny’. Under the States of Emergency in the country the public gatherings at which his speeches had been so successful were banned. The press, fearful of prosecution and shut-down, took a chance on reporting only the words of leaders so prominent, so well known in the outside world that the government hesitated to act when these leaders defied the law. Sonny a backroom boy, useful for writing statements that appeared or were spoken under the names of the venerable, or for tidying up the vocabulary of the rising stars to give them more weight. Again, as he had done once before, in a moment when old comradeship, the special intimacy of the clandestine life, made it seem possible, he embarrassed others with the direct: Aren’t I trusted any more? And there were such denials, such protests—what was he thinking of? What had got into his head?

  But were they not thinking—had they not thought, what had got into his head, into his life, deflected him from purpose, the only purpose that mattered at the time when they couldn’t do without him—what had got into his head was preoccupation with a woman. There is no place for a second obsession in the life of a revolutionary. But he had never neglected the cause, for her! She was enfolded, one with it, she had connected his manhood, his sexual power as a man, with it! She had given commitment the pumping of the heart. He was overcome with distress at this denial of her (in himself); at this injustice to himself.

  And then again—in his depression, the absence of Sonny/ Aila, his feelings somersaulted violently; he found himself thinking—insanely—that if the law had still forbidden him Hannah, if that Nazi law for the ‘purity’ of the white race that disgustingly conceived it had still been in force, he would never have risked himself. For Hannah. Could not have. Because needing Hannah, taking the risk of going to prison for that white woman would have put at risk his only freedom, the only freedom of his kind, the freedom to go to prison again and again, if need be, for the struggle. Only for the struggle. Nothing else was worthwhile, recognized, nothing. That filthy law would have saved him.

  Out of the shot and danger of desire

  And then he feared himself, come to such perverse conjecture. If it should somehow show in his face, if anyone should somehow sense the shame of it passing through his mind, one of their interrogators jeering in glee, one of his comrades: staring, appalled.

  He turned fifty-two. The day was not remarked in any way. His son did not remember the birthday but, a few days after, a card came. Pasted on it was the photograph of a laughing small child in a cap with Mickey Mouse ears. Loving wishes (the formula of the card), and hand-written X-ed kisses, signatures—Baby, Aila, the husband he had never met.

  A tide wearing away a coastline, little by little, falling into the ocean of time. They fall away, one by one, lovers, the clinging arms of children, the memory of when life was unthinkable without them. Fifty-two. And all the while he was triumphant in his vitality and virility, apparently unaffected by his forty-something years, this decay was taking place … His gums (the dentist insisted it was a long-term process) were already shrinking, his prostate (Jasood said he might have to operate) was becoming enlarged. Close to the earth and happy for battle as he had felt himself, age was there, working within him.

  Yet what had been the political ideal now became realized in his daily life under circumstances never sought. Living with his son in a house emptied of its life—two silent men, unable to sustain it—he was stripped of every obligation, every preoccupation, left for the cause alone. And unfettered, even, by any ambition, from the seduction of bei
ng the crowds’ ‘Sonny’, which perhaps at one time muddied the clear commitment that had evolved in the schoolmaster, he continued to work for the cause now, all his days and half the nights whenever he was needed. He lived like so many others of his kind whose families are fragmented in the diaspora of exile, code names, underground activity, people for whom a real home and attachments are something for others who will come after.

  There were no more letters from the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. Occasional phone calls came with Aila’s voice, deceptively near in his ear; far away, in countries she didn’t name. After a few minutes he would pass the receiver to the one she was waiting for; although he no longer had it to his ear, standing by he could hear Aila’s voice rise with excitement now that she found herself talking to her son.

  When everything was forgotten, he dreamt of her: Hannah. A brief, brilliant dream precise as an engraving. Out of the steep dark of his sleep she shook each foot like a cat, as she always had, scattering drops of water while she got out of the bath.

  The dream wakened him. He could not fall asleep again. There flashed and plunged behind his closed eyelids a broken sequence of men with white rags tied across their faces in torchlight, men on horseback carrying their flag with its emblem of the swastika, the deformed shape twisted once again to the same purpose. White extremists were rallying to that sign; blacks who had moved into white neighbourhoods were suffering threats and vandalism beneath it. And fear, fear.

  An electronic cricket sounding in the quiet: he could hear the creaking whirr of Will’s word-processor, printing out. At least the boy seemed to have turned studious enough, although business administration was not exactly the aspect of economics he himself would have chosen for his son. The boy, too, worked late night after night on whatever it was he was doing, since he’d bought the word-processor with money saved from part-time jobs he found himself. It was not possible to get up and go to the boy, tell him, I can’t sleep, talk to me. But the silence was not the silence of the day, between them; Will was there, they were still together.

  Although Sonny had been refused a passport for the compassionate purpose of visiting his wife and daughter, others were making the trip across the frontier for openly political purposes. White industrialists, churchmen, academics, liberals and lawyers: they were people belonging to professional and social structures within the law, even if they now pressed official confidence in them by tentatively stepping beyond it. Most never had had, nor sought, any contact with the liberation movement within the country. The instinct of a ruling class to seek out what it hoped might be the discovery of something of their own kind beneath a different skin and a different rhetoric ignored the opportunities to do so at home and led them to go abroad to meet the movement’s leaders in exile, instead. For the feared future seemed to exist, already, there, outside the country. Perhaps some of its expected retribution might be won over, by pre-emption, before it arrived within.

  Some came back in a euphoric state. The exiled leaders wore lounge suits not Castro fatigues, they could small-talk over wine. Surely such people were not really revolutionaries? And even the Russians, who had armed them all these years, had turned out to be amenable to dining in Pretoria—in the end there is surely no deal so difficult, so unlikely, so obscured by tear-gas, punctured by gunshot wounds, so bedevilled by the explosion of land-mines and petrol bombs, by the preparation of lifetimes of imprisonment, the documentation of nights of interrogation, by the thundering of trucks moving thousands from their homes—no deal that, in the end, cannot be clinched in the course of a business lunch.

  And meanwhile, let the police and army deal, in another proven way, with the strikers and demonstrators, the eloquent troublemakers, black and white, at home. And if they can’t do it, there’s yet another way of dealing: never discover those who finish off the troublemakers, killing from behind masked faces and shooting from moving cars.

  At the same time as envoys of change on the white man’s terms were flying back and forth, some perhaps secretly briefed by the government, several of Sonny’s colleagues were getting travel documents restricted to certain destinations and valid for short periods. Some pragmatist in Pretoria must have calculated this could sweeten up the American Congress in its raucous calls for mandatory sanctions against the country. There was no logic—for anyone outside the Department of the Interior—to the decisions why this one should be let out on a string and that one should not. One or two were able to fly to Lusaka or London directly after being released from a spell of detention; the applications of others, like Sonny, were refused repeatedly. He had given up, for the time being, anyway. Assigned to responsibilities dealing with the crisis in black education, he was too busy to absent himself. And there were more and more disturbing happenings to preoccupy him; some in the area where he himself lived. At this house bricks were flung through a bedroom window; over the façade of that one, paint was splashed. Graffiti left its snail-trail of slime. Only a street away from Sonny’s house a couple had just moved in and were arranging their furniture when a group of white men and women invaded the house and ordered them to leave. One bellowed at the husband:—This’s a white suburb under Group Areas and there’s enough of us to make you people get out. Even if it’s made a free-settlement area we’re not going to take any kind of kak law here, I’m warning you.—The wife said she was going to call the police; the group laughed, and tramped away. Little wonder they had laughed; the police told the couple they were occupying the house illegally: there were no grounds to file a complaint.

  In the midst of these preoccupations one of the leaders took Sonny aside at a backroom meeting and informed him he was one of a small group called to consult in Lusaka. Travel papers had been obtained for all six comrades. Although nothing was said, he understood that leadership outside must have made it clear he was to be among them: a recognition beyond anyone’s doubts about him, including self-doubt.

  There was a difference between leaving the crisis for a family visit and being ordered to go as part of the movement’s activity. There was a difference between stepping out of the plane before Aila, before Baby, as the one left out, left behind, coming only as a husband and father, and arriving as part of an official party, driven away to meet with the highest level of leadership in the hospitality of President Kaunda’s presidential residence. In the cupboard where he went to look for a suitcase he came across the old carryall Aila used to keep packed for him in case he were to be detained. There was nothing suitable for this journey. He went down to the Oriental Plaza, where she had chosen her curtain material, and bought himself, on the recommendation of the shopkeeper who also was a comrade, a zippered bag with shoulder strap, pockets, and a combination lock.

  When he came back from the trip Will was there at the airport to meet him. Will! Will, on the fringe of the crowd at International Arrivals who pressed forward, kissing grandmothers and lovers, exclaiming over babies, blocking the path of other passengers trooping sheepishly behind their trolleys. He felt himself break into the same proud, foolish, happy grin with which all the passengers faced home; someone must have informed Will that his father was coming back on this day and time. Will had come!

  They stood before each other as if about to embrace. Sonny was babbling something, his free hand already feeling for the photographs in his breast pocket. Of course he could not talk there and then of the substance of the consultation with the leadership in exile; he had to confine himself to family matters pursued on the side.—They’re in great shape—wait till you see—you should just hear your nephew sing, before he can even speak! Baby’s keen to have you come up, I’ve got a whole long screed from her for you—

  Will took the bag over his shoulder and walked ahead to the parking lot.—And Aila?—

  Sonny seemed hurt by the interruption.—I’ll tell you about that later. She’s in Sweden. Just missed her by a day. Only one day …—He settled into the passenger seat and closed the door.—Now let’s get home, my boy!�
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  His son put the key in the ignition and then turned his head so that his gaze would be inescapable for either of them. —They did it yesterday. Burned down.—

  I was working Saturdays in a cinema, checking tickets at the entrance, and I came back to the house after the early matinee shift. That street is always livelier on Saturdays than other days; everyone off work for the weekend, and no school for the children. And Afrikaners and our people living there—everyone gardening or washing cars, the kids performing acrobatics with their skate boards and bicycles, the Afrikaners’ visitors drinking beer on the stoeps, our selection of aunties and cousins and suitors being entertained indoors.

  Not many people come to the house where he and I sleep. Baby and her friends don’t giggle and drink Coke sitting on the steps. The cockroaches have to themselves the kitchen where delicacies were prepared. The rosebushes somehow have survived although nobody waters them. Most of the time the place appears to be shut up. But on this day the small space between the fence and the stoep was full of people and a crowd, thickening at the edges as men left tinkering with motorbicycles and cars to come up, and women joined them, and boys toted their skate boards towards the attraction, filled the width of the street. I could see only the backs of sheets of cardboard attached to staffs or hand-held on raised arms, tilted about above heads. Someone was ranting in Afrikaans but he had no loud-hailer and I could make out nothing against the restless approval of the crowd, a horrible purr of strange pleasure, a human sound I have never heard before, pierced by the shrieks of small children playing somewhere down among the legs. All white people. I don’t know whether our own white neighbours were among them or not, the expression on their faces distorted them all alike. I’m confusedly aware that some of our people were there, on the fringe, there was a scuffle, someone was punched: there were others of our kind under whose eyes I passed where they stood, quite still, back in the cover of their stoeps, up the street. I walked on and entered the crowd, twisting my shoulders this side and that to make way, saying—I could hear myself!—excuse me, excuse me, let me pass—idiotically, still the well-brought-up young man, the way my mother taught us. The placards tipped and jiggled at me. OUR HOME WHITE GO TO YOUR LOCATION COMMUNISTS + BLACKS = END OF OUR CIVILISATION GET OUT KEEP SA WHITE. There was a crude drawing recognizably supposed to be him: the big, dark-rimmed eyes, the curled nostrils. It was slashed across with thick red strokes. I struggled my way to the front door and put my hands up, palm out, stiff fingers splayed, thrusting into those faces from which yells and shouts came at me like bricks and stones, thrusting them away from this shelter where he said he’d provide a decent place for us to live. The man who ranted was tramping, leaping up and down, green socks sagging over running shoes, bruise-coloured tattoos on the ropes of thick tense red calves and bulging red shoulders bare in a sleeveless T-shirt, huge swollen red face bristling with blonde hairs and sweat, tears of rage—I don’t know. Wat maak jy hier? Wat maak jy hier? They were roaring at me, taking it up as a chant.