My Son's Story (12 page)
Authors: Nadine Gordimer
Saved himself.
Now he had something he would never speak, not to anyone, certainly not to her.
For what if she took it smugly as a proof of love? A female triumph. What would that do to him? To his judgment of himself. To his belief that she was not like any other woman and their relationship was formed in a special and different morality: the excruciating recasting of the meaning of love in the struggle, that made him celebrate a particular kind of parting from his own child.
But her mind surfaced on the periphery of his, maybe through the contact of their bodies, not divining what he was experiencing there beside her but instinctively circling the danger of its context.âWhen people make violence the ultimate test of who's right and who's wrong, hereâyou know the argument I meanââthe struggle is no better than the oppression because violence on the part of the oppressed can never be justified', it reduces them to the level of the oppressor and so on ⦠people like that are so naive ⦠I'd almost say innocent. I don't mean that excuses them. But they babble like toddlers who don't know what they're saying because they haven't lived enough to connect words with the reality of acts. Most white people here haven't livedânot lived what life really is here ⦠if you define the life of a country by the most general experience. If they could have been there the other day, just once, seen the police come down on us, no reason, we were all leaving the place, anyway â¦just shooting, and three people dead ⦠That man, dead. If they could be there when it happens, only once, and it happens somewhere every day. They'd understand why people murder informers with whatever weapons they can lay their hands on.â
She had given him safe passage to the open waters of generality.
âYes, but it's more than that. If you define when violence
is a necessity, then you're accepting it can't be done without in this world. And that's hard to take, even here, even now.â
is a necessity, then you're accepting it can't be done without in this world. And that's hard to take, even here, even now.â
âOh Sonny, at least we know one thing when we're forced, in ourselves, to accept it. We know the spit and polish of armies is to conceal the truth that war is blood, agony, rot and shit. That's all it's ever been. The high technology of ARMSCOR Magnus Malan boasts about. The marvellous sophistication of the latest killer, what's-it, the Rooikat, the tank they say out-ranges and outfires anything the Russians or Americans have made. Napoleon's grand army crawling back from Moscow on frozen feet. The Japanese skinned alive by the thing that was dropped on Hiroshima. That's the famous military tradition. Our warsâguerrilla wars with their ragged improvisation have put an end to the lie. No more going off to fight with a brass-band send-off. If you blow yourself up with the bomb you're placing, only the police are going to pick up the pieces. Take even the hijackers and hostage-takers: they shoot their victims or they get shot themselves when they're overcome; or both. It's nothing but suffering. Any kind of war, any kind. So at least if we have to accept violence, we know what we're doing, we're not dolling it up. I find that helps.â
âNot for me. I never thought I ever would accept violence, even if I didn't have to do it myself ⦠Even if others were to do it for me. I sit in meetings, I take part in decisions where it's taken for granted counter-violence â¦our violence â¦has its absolutely necessary role. That's what it's called, a role; it's what I call it. Like in a play; and I'm not playing that particular role but I'm in the cast.â
âCould you do it yourself?â
But it was a mystery; Sonny could not even say he did not know. A mystery the schoolteacher had not taken into account, dreamt of, during the period when, remote from induction, he
was philosophically puzzling over the extra-religious mystery of power: the power of life and death. He might have said only: all I have had was the courage to be a victim. Until now.
was philosophically puzzling over the extra-religious mystery of power: the power of life and death. He might have said only: all I have had was the courage to be a victim. Until now.
A watery after-light of the storm glossed the everted lips of each lily's single fold. They seemed to be of wet white marble, the pistils rising from carved shadow.
âNo scent.âShe was remembering his daughter's rose, in comparison.
He stroked her now.âHow would you know, you smoke so much.â
A long moment of peace between them.
âCould you get me to stop?â
âHow? If you'd tell me how.â
She turned on her elbow, in her familiar way, propped up to see again the dark smile, the bold features scrolled about by black curls, the eyes looking out from some forest of her imagination that she had found for the first time across the visitors' barrier in a prison.
For him, the flesh of her face fell forward a little, plumping her cheeks. Her eyesâliving all his life among soft dark eyes, he never ceased to see the curiousness of blue as the perception trained on him.âTell me.â
âI don't know. Only you could find out.â
Where to find out? In her lolling breasts that hung and swung against him, on her pale swollen lips, in the seaweed-coloured hair under her arms and the quiff, like the tuft brushed up on a fair baby's head, over the place he entered her? Nowhere there. Somewhere else, in himself.
Although they talked together often of his family, she seldom mentioned her ex-husband; this was because, and he understood, she seldom thought of him. He drifted to the surface of her mind, now.âDerek used to drink â¦a lot. He wanted to
write something, he always wanted to, and then when he was fed up with law, he tried. It was interesting to watch. Just enough to drink, and it wouldâseem toâI don't knowâdilate his sensibilities. He would say marvellous things. He'd tell me what he was going to write. But next day it was gone. Apparently if you drink you have to write down what you've got hold of, right away. It's a brief flare in the brain. It's gone once the alcohol burns out. He couldn't remember, next day. He never wrote it. I saw how drink wipes out memory; opens a door and then closes it. It was scary.â
write something, he always wanted to, and then when he was fed up with law, he tried. It was interesting to watch. Just enough to drink, and it wouldâseem toâI don't knowâdilate his sensibilities. He would say marvellous things. He'd tell me what he was going to write. But next day it was gone. Apparently if you drink you have to write down what you've got hold of, right away. It's a brief flare in the brain. It's gone once the alcohol burns out. He couldn't remember, next day. He never wrote it. I saw how drink wipes out memory; opens a door and then closes it. It was scary.â
âYou couldn't stop the drinking.â
By itself, out of habit, her hand took the packet of cigarettes from the floor beside her, shook one free and put it in her mouth, then, in a second of bewilderment, took it out and put it down awkwardly on the pillow. âNo. We were finished. I couldn't find out how. I couldn't do anything for him.â
Sonny sank into dread; and from that cold, sucking clay the only escape was unwelcome resentmentâwomen, these two women with their capacity to wound, to threaten. And this one's innocent capacity simply to be needed, resting her healing mouth on his, now, so that he squirmed in a wild tangle of bedclothes to lie over her.
They're more proud of Baby than of me. Even my mother. She cried when we got a message from Lusaka so we knew Baby'd gone, Baby was there, and I didn't know what to do except what you see on television: I put my arm round her and patted her shoulder. The message came through him, one of his contacts, but she cried only when he was out of the house. And I haven't seen her cry again.
I gained three distinctions and a university pass and he's going to get me a bursary through his white fellow-traveller friends. What shall I study (once you've left school, adults ask you that, they don't ask patronizingly what are you going to be, any more); he doesn't say anything, I know he's hoping I'll make use of his old complete works, but I've applied for entry to the faculty of commerce. I'll be an educated shopkeeper with a business-school degree, how's that, a shopkeeper, in the tradition of some of my mother's relatives who run fruit and vegetable stalls and palm off to the blacks produce that's gone bad. What's the difference? It's merchandising, same as the wholesaler
who once gave him a job out of charity, and the great supporter of the cause who comes sometimes to our houseâthe one who's made his fortune out of work clothing sold to the exploited masses he and my father are going to freeâhe supplies those maroon jerseys you see stretched over the bosoms of black nurses.
who once gave him a job out of charity, and the great supporter of the cause who comes sometimes to our houseâthe one who's made his fortune out of work clothing sold to the exploited masses he and my father are going to freeâhe supplies those maroon jerseys you see stretched over the bosoms of black nurses.
My parents wanted to give a party to celebrate my success. And did they think they would inviteâhis blonde woman?
We still have my mother's occasional big teas for the aunties and cousins and the two grannies from our old place outside Benoniâmy grandfathers are both dead, now. If nothing else exists between my mother and him, for some reason I can't understand they co-operate in this keeping up of appearances. He makes a great effort to be there on the day. I wonder what he tells his comrades if they need him, I wonder what he tells her when she expects him in that room where her grubby bras and pants lie about. (My mother irons our shirts, his and mine, and folds them so beautifully you'd think they'd just come from a shop.)
I have to be around on that kind of Saturday afternoon, too. I tell her I think I'm going to be out somewhere, just to see her lovely face giving me full attention, confirming, for me, that without me she's desertedâbut of course I don't go. I won't do what her daughter did, leave her to weep.
The conversation of relatives over sweet cakes and fancy biscuits rolled in coconut is all questions and answersâ
how old is this one now, is that one married, has so and so had a baby, where is so and so living
âwhich reach standard conclusions:
that nice oh really what a blessing oh shame ay. And where's Baby, Aila? Aren't we going to see Baby my, last time we see her she's growing really pretty now glamorous, né, I'm telling you, I said to Ma, we was watching a fillum, isn't that actress the dead spit of Aila's Baby â¦
how old is this one now, is that one married, has so and so had a baby, where is so and so living
âwhich reach standard conclusions:
that nice oh really what a blessing oh shame ay. And where's Baby, Aila? Aren't we going to see Baby my, last time we see her she's growing really pretty now glamorous, né, I'm telling you, I said to Ma, we was watching a fillum, isn't that actress the dead spit of Aila's Baby â¦
My mother has her answer. Baby is far away. Overseas.
Overseas! Oh that's nice. And the old ones, out of pride in our superiorly educated branch of the family and a dim notion that the places of learning are designated once and for all, as the Mount is for the Sermon, Mecca for the Black Stone (according to their religious beliefs) think they must have heard Baby is in London or even Americaâfor if there follows another question,
and what's she doing,
my father answers: furthering her education.
and what's she doing,
my father answers: furthering her education.
And so it is my mother who's told the lie, not he. He was telling the truth, Baby's learning what's necessary, in our time and for our place in the world. He's a teacherâalthough they know he's been to prison for his political activities most no doubt believe he still practises the profession they respect as the height of intellectual achievementâand his remark opens up before them, sightseers at the gates, the broad receding avenues of the grand vista they will never enter, while he and his children disappear freely down distant perspectives.
They don't speak the way we do (how could they, they haven't had a teacher in the house to correct their grammar) and, on my father's side of the family, expect to drink too much beerâthat's their way of enjoying themselves. Our house wakes up for one afternoon to the tramping back and forth to the lavatory, the coarse harmless laughter, the happy shrills and mournful wails of children, the giggling of hand-holding sweethearts, the loud partisanships of soccer and the exchange of recipes. They are our people, they are what we might have been: our parents who bettered themselves; Baby and I. How could you compare my father with Uncle Gavin debonairly wearing, even in the house, his straw hat with its paisley band, that honey-coloured, wily, quick-eyed man laughing kindly on an expanse of empty gums, who has done time for his traffic in sending stolen cars over the border to Swaziland and made enough profit to set
himself up in his transport business? âDoing time' isn't just their euphemism for âserving a prison sentence', which my father did: it's the hazard of an entirely different attitude to the meaning of living. I see that, when the relatives are among usâor rather when we're among them. My father went to prison for themâthese aunties and uncles and cousins and kids who live back in the ghetto we come from. And I see that my father really loves themâmore, he respects them, he hasn't left them behind out of any ambition for himself. He has no GAVIN'S TRUCK AND CAR HIRE to show for the time he's done. What am I to do? When I see my father like this, just as when I've sat, without his ever knowing, at the back of a hall when he was making a speech, I love himâagain; forget everything. My mother, myself; that woman.
himself up in his transport business? âDoing time' isn't just their euphemism for âserving a prison sentence', which my father did: it's the hazard of an entirely different attitude to the meaning of living. I see that, when the relatives are among usâor rather when we're among them. My father went to prison for themâthese aunties and uncles and cousins and kids who live back in the ghetto we come from. And I see that my father really loves themâmore, he respects them, he hasn't left them behind out of any ambition for himself. He has no GAVIN'S TRUCK AND CAR HIRE to show for the time he's done. What am I to do? When I see my father like this, just as when I've sat, without his ever knowing, at the back of a hall when he was making a speech, I love himâagain; forget everything. My mother, myself; that woman.
The relatives are warily impressed by this house we live in illegally in a street among white people. Cousin Vyvian (our people often give their children fancy names, a distinction those who count for nothing among whites may nevertheless claim) who was brought up in the same house with my father, harangues the men on his fill of beer, using an imagined movie gangster manner although he is a shelf-packer in a supermarket. âListen, my baby, let me tell youâSonny's going to do a good thing for us, ek sé ⦠A good thing.âHe gazes jerkily round the colonial-pillared archway in the entrance to our sitting-room, but the imperial pretensions of some white owner who lived here, long before the neighbourhood went down enough for us to risk moving in, don't represent the aims he's stumbling to draw from a fuddle of frustrations.âNo shit, my baby. I'm not going to take it for ever, ay. Me neither.
Hotnot
do this do that. Things is going to be very different. They not going to sit on their arses while I break mine for a hundred and fifty bucks a week. Ye-suss! No ways, my baby, and I'm telling you ⦠a
good thing. Let them go where they like, we coming right on and push them out. Ay, Sonny, no shit, ay? A good thing for us.â
Hotnot
do this do that. Things is going to be very different. They not going to sit on their arses while I break mine for a hundred and fifty bucks a week. Ye-suss! No ways, my baby, and I'm telling you ⦠a
good thing. Let them go where they like, we coming right on and push them out. Ay, Sonny, no shit, ay? A good thing for us.â
Forget it man Vyv Ag, come on, such a big mouth Lay off old Vyv he's all right
But my father steadies the arm of the ignorant and bewildered man he shared a bed with (he's told us many times) as a child, and thanks him; it's not a sober man holding up a drunk one, it's an exchange of support. I don't understand.
I snap back the rings on the beer cans bought for the occasion, I hand round the tea and cakes for her. When they ask me what I'm doing I say I'm going to study at the university. Among whites: of course. It's what they expect of Sonny's boy. Sonny was always the clever one, the one who would go far. And my mother shows the women her kitchen; they're full of admiring envy, they can see how lucky she is, always was, so refined, a real lady, and deserving, chosen by Sonny, marked out to go far with him.
They've all left, the performance is over. He came out of the cinema into bright daylight; and me.
Imagine the prestige he gets out of it among his comradesâhis daughter, skipped the country to join the Freedom Fighters. Dedicated in the tradition of her father, who ârecently narrowly escaped death', so the papers said, when the police charged a cleansing-of-the-graves gathering where he was speaking. âSonny' the popular figure in resistance politics, whereabouts often unknown since sometimes he's obliged to go underground. During the boycott campaign against yet another of the elections where we can vote to put people of our colour onto councils whose decisions can be reversed by whites, he didn't sleep at home at night because that's the place and time the police would come for him; suits him fineâoh but then I suppose the police
know as well as I do where to find that big bed right there in the room as you enter. So he wouldn't have been able to use his perfect alibi to spend nights with her. I suppose she wouldn't let him, anyway. She's what the comrades would call âa good girl', and they don't mean she's not easy with men. They mean she can be relied upon to know the priorities. My mother's not in the struggle so my mother is no priority. When he looks at me as he sometimes does I'm supposed to remember that.
know as well as I do where to find that big bed right there in the room as you enter. So he wouldn't have been able to use his perfect alibi to spend nights with her. I suppose she wouldn't let him, anyway. She's what the comrades would call âa good girl', and they don't mean she's not easy with men. They mean she can be relied upon to know the priorities. My mother's not in the struggle so my mother is no priority. When he looks at me as he sometimes does I'm supposed to remember that.
If his woman were not a good girl it would be all right for me to loathe her.
I got my parents to pay me to go away for a week as the celebration of my success in matric. I went down to Durban on the motorbike and picked up a girl on the beach the first day. It was easy. Some of the beaches are open to all of us now. So I've lived with a woman for six days, fucked her and slept in the same bed with her, and don't want ever to see her again.
Â
Â
Sonny realized only too well he had the advantage. Aila being Aila, she couldn't be expected to take the sacrifice of her daughter (that was how she would see it) as he did. Aila did not have access to his kind of acceptance of Baby's choice to begin her life, the resource discovered in himself from which his responses came, now: his political commitment. He could quite see it: for Aila, all was loss. There was no gain. Although her eyes had changedâhe noticed her dark-grained lids were slightly lowered, she no longer looked out with the ready gaze of the young Ailaâshe still saw ânot living for yourself' in terms of a schoolteacher's extra-curricular activities of social uplift in a little community across the veld somewhere. He had left her behind, there.
Poor Aila.
But nobody loved Baby more than he did, nobody! The boy was âher' child; Baby was âhis'; these things were never admitted in the virtuous convention of an obscure little schoolteacher's family in a dorp ghetto. But it always had been so; even then, he knew he was not the socially impotent male whose only positive contribution to his outcast people is to beget another male to carry on a family name. What had Aila done to assuage his anguish at Baby's attempt to end her life before it had begun? Nothing. Silence. Silence upon the other silence. Comfort and understanding he had had to find elsewhere. âI could do nothing for him. We were finished.' Hannah's flash of perception suddenly passed from the ominous focus it had had for him at the time and picked out of his darkness, Aila. Lit upon her. Aila could do nothing for him. He could do nothing for Aila. Thank god she had the boy. Such a disappointment in other ways, at least there was this to be said for him.
First there had been Sonny's discovery that the individual decision to lead a protest party of children is only an amateur's beginning, a half-conscious sign of readiness to learn disciplined political action. Then, in the process (and he retained a pedagogue's faith in the learning process as a never-ending one) there came the inspiring satisfaction of action arising from the decisions of like minds. Then the bonding of prison, a brotherhood those in the safe world can only mimic with their play-play ordeals of ordination or initiation, taking the habit and vows of chastity or getting vomit-drunk. In solitary confinement there is no choice but chastity and abstention. No sacrifice or celebration. The secret signs between initiates are messages tapped with a knuckle to be received by an ear pressed to the other side of a wall. The blood brotherhood is exchanged when hymns are taken up from cell to cell to accompany an unknown to the hangman. Sonny had heard this dread choir. He had told
Hannah about those dark mornings, while he and she were waking to the song of birds. Confessed everything about them. âHow is it for a man when those hymns don't mean anything to him? What would happen to me, if I were going off to die like that, with no prayers and no god â¦I lay there while it got light â¦â
Hannah about those dark mornings, while he and she were waking to the song of birds. Confessed everything about them. âHow is it for a man when those hymns don't mean anything to him? What would happen to me, if I were going off to die like that, with no prayers and no god â¦I lay there while it got light â¦â
âI'm told they sing freedom songs.â
âThen the warders come and kick the cell doors and swear. I'm not talking about fear ⦠Normally, people like us never think what it must be like because as far as we're concerned criminals, murderers, hang. We don't. But here, where politicals are hanged, when you're inside and you hear the singing, you think of things that didn't ever have to enter your mind before.â
The learning process continues.
Although a liberation movement strives to act rather than react, because its existence is a phenomenon of opposition to power it is constantly forced to respond to what those in power do, to move in the foreshadow of what the power is planning to do, and to predict what it might or might not be led to do by any pre-emptive action. âTaking into account changing circumstances' is a tenet like that of a farmer taking into account the weather, and it covers as many factors as there are signs in the heavens, variables in the four winds. Sonny's late development of political sense, grown slowly out of a priggish and subservient morality, ensured that his judgment never lost touch with principle, while his unhesitating return to the struggle after detainment and imprisonment ensured that he was capable of bold pragmatism. With these credentials added to his intelligence and gifts as a speaker, he had emerged from among others to the company of decision-makers. There, the combination in his personality was reflected in his position: considered as one of
the radicals, he was yet reassuring to the cautious; he could be used to press decisions in a form acceptable to them. There was an exhilarating war-time will to consensus on the strategy and tactics of attacking the government and its supports, military and economic, throughout the world, as well as in the country itself. Comrades who were arrested were immediately replaced by others ready to do their work; the interchangeability of leadership again and again defeated bans and imprisonments. Under the endless disruption of a hounding Stateâfiles seized, offices burned down, comrades become political nomads sleeping when and where they couldâthe huge problems of mass organization continued to be debated and tackled. How to emphasize a constituency among hoes and factory overalls without losing the chance to draw in the people the government were co-opting with the penny sweetmeats of middle class instead of rights? How to get rid of corrupt, government-protected councillors without the people taking the decision into the hands of their own anger and killing them? How to keep proper contact with the youth and street committees who wear the T-shirts and carry the colours but go beyond the approved methods of struggle and give the State the opportunity to charge leadership with incitement to murder? What issuesâpopulation removals, strikes, stay-at-homes, boycottsâwould be most effective, pursued where, at what period?
the radicals, he was yet reassuring to the cautious; he could be used to press decisions in a form acceptable to them. There was an exhilarating war-time will to consensus on the strategy and tactics of attacking the government and its supports, military and economic, throughout the world, as well as in the country itself. Comrades who were arrested were immediately replaced by others ready to do their work; the interchangeability of leadership again and again defeated bans and imprisonments. Under the endless disruption of a hounding Stateâfiles seized, offices burned down, comrades become political nomads sleeping when and where they couldâthe huge problems of mass organization continued to be debated and tackled. How to emphasize a constituency among hoes and factory overalls without losing the chance to draw in the people the government were co-opting with the penny sweetmeats of middle class instead of rights? How to get rid of corrupt, government-protected councillors without the people taking the decision into the hands of their own anger and killing them? How to keep proper contact with the youth and street committees who wear the T-shirts and carry the colours but go beyond the approved methods of struggle and give the State the opportunity to charge leadership with incitement to murder? What issuesâpopulation removals, strikes, stay-at-homes, boycottsâwould be most effective, pursued where, at what period?
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