My Son's Story (25 page)

Authors: Nadine Gordimer

BOOK: My Son's Story

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It's an old storyâours. My father's and mine. Love, love/ hate are the most common and universal of experiences. But no two are alike, each is a fingerprint of life. That's the miracle that makes literature and links it with creation itself in the biological sense.

In our story, like all stories, I've made up what I wasn't there to experience myself. SometimesâI can seeâI've told something in terms I wouldn't have been capable of, aware of, at the period when it was happening: the licence of hindsight. Sometimes I can hear my voice breaking through, my judgments, my opinions elbowing in on what are supposed to be other people's. I'll have to watch out for that next time. Sometimes memory has opened a trapdoor and dropped me back into the experience as if I were living it again just at the stage I was when I lived it, so I've told it that way, in the present tense, with the vocabulary that was all I had to express myself, then. And so I've learned what he didn't teach me, that grammar is a system of mastering time; to write down âhe was', âhe is', âhe
will be' is to grasp past, present and future. Whole; no longer bearing away.

All of it, all of it.

I have that within that passeth show.

I've imagined, out of their deception, the frustration of my absence, the pain of knowing them too well, what others would be doing, saying and feeling in the gaps between my witness. All the details about Sonny and his women?âoh, those I've taken from the women I've known. âSonny is not the man he was'; someone has said that to me: his comrades think it's because Aila's gone. But I'm young and it's my time that's come, with women. My time that's coming with politics. I was excluded from that, it didn't suit them for me to have any function within it, but I'm going to be the one to record, someday, what he and my mother/Aila and Baby and the others did, what it really was like to live a life determined by the struggle to be free, as desert dwellers' days are determined by the struggle against thirst and those of dwellers amid snow and ice by the struggle against the numbing of cold. That's what struggle really is, not a platform slogan repeated like a TV jingle.

He's been detained again. I wake up before it's light, these days, and I'm aware of him there, shut away. As if he were breathing in the next room in the house that's burned down. I've sent him this but I don't know if they'll give it to him. It's not Shakespeare; well, anyway â¦

4 a.m.
A bird sharpening its song against the morning
Furze of prison blanket mangy against the lips
Bird out there
Long ago we picked it up
Wired the tiny skeleton to make it bird again
Bird
Come, I'll hold you cupped in my two hands
Stroke your smooth feathers
Open the bars of my fingers and let you
Go!
Through the spaces of the iron bars
Fly!
Come, lover, comrade, friend, child, bird
Come
I entice you with my crumbs, seeâ
Dove
Sprig of olive in its beak
Dashes in swift through the bars, breaks its neck
Against stone walls.

What he didâmy fatherâmade me a writer. Do I have to thank him for that? Why couldn't I have been something else?

I am a writer and this is my first bookâthat I can never publish.

Also by Nadine Gordimer

NOVELS

The Lying Days
A World of Strangers
Occasion for Loving
The Late Bourgeois World
A Guest of Honour
The Conservationist
Burger's Daughter
July's People
A Sport of Nature

STORIES

The Soft Voice of the Serpent
Six Feet of the Country
Friday's Footprint
Not for Publication
Livingstone's Companions
A Soldier's Embrace
Selected Stories
Something Out There

OTHER WORKS

The Black Interpreters
On the Mines (with David Goldblatt)
Lifetimes Under Apartheid (with David Goldblatt)
The Essential Gesture (edited by Stephen Clingman)

Notes

Clergymen.

Detainees' Parents Support Committee.

A women's anti-apartheid organization.

Declared a prohibited immigrant.

âSun City', actually a casino resort, is the name given by political prisoners to Diepkloof Prison, near Johannesburg.

eISBN 9780374707569

First eBook Edition : June 2011

Library of Congress card catalog number: 90-83232

First edition, 1990