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Authors: Nadine Gordimer

BOOK: My Son's Story
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But even if the islands and forests were only post-coital reveries, they had Hannah's cottage, Hannah's bed, which was unlike any other bed Sonny had ever known, not only because of what passed between her and him there but because it was not a bed at all—a very big mattress laid directly on the floor. He thought when he first saw it that it meant she was not properly settled in; or perhaps it was some Japanese idea. There were so many tastes, he, coming from his background, did not know about. Futon? she prompted, and laughed. Ah, no, just that she liked to be close to the wood of the floor, the earth beneath it. And how right she was. How unnecessary to have little bedside cabinets with hand-woven lampshades you had to be careful not to knock over in your sleep. Under the softness of the mattress only the law of gravity itself.
If his need of Hannah was terrible—in a magnificent way—then there was no need of anything or anyone else. She knew a lot of poetry—his Shakespeare was a poor stock, compared with hers. She taught him a love-poem he had never heard of, didn't know it was something done to death everyone who had taken a university first-year course in English literature could reel off. It described perfectly those months when Hannah's one room, for them, was ‘an everywhere'.
This perfect isolation existed while Sonny and Hannah
seemed to themselves to be getting away with the impossible. Its very intensity was granted on the condition that it could not last. Everything outside was ready to rupture it. Circumstance, conscience—there was a rictus of dire fear, to admit it—might take her from him, him from her, any day. But months went by. Their concealment of each other from the world continued to be successful. And now they passed into the second stage of the syndrome that Sonny, never having had the experience before, did not recognize. The fascination in living something totally removed from domestic love with its social dimensions of ordinary shared pleasures among other people gave way to dissatisfaction that they could not do these ordinary things together. For these belonged to Aila, Aila and the children. He could visit friends with Aila, and have her sitting there talking trivialities in the usual corner with the women while he was in a discussion at the other end of the room, a discussion Hannah would have been taking part in, they would have been contributing to together, complementing each other's ideas. He could go to a play (since they had moved to the city he had encouraged his family to take the opportunity to enjoy black theatre) with Aila and his son and daughter but there would not come from them the kind of comment, challenging his own thoughts, he would have had if Hannah had been with him. And there grew in him, in her—he knew it was against all sense and reason—a defiant desire
to be seen to belong together
. To show each other off. They didn't admit it, but knew it was there, as they knew everything about one another while in their chosen isolation.
Once they were taken by an obstinate, irresistible hankering to see a film together. An ordinary thing like that, which any other couple could do. Instead of spending the afternoon making love, they went across the city to a cinema complex in a suburb where neither knew anyone, a suburb of rich white people who
never attended protest meetings or knew, had seen in flesh and blood, anyone who had been a political prisoner. And there, of course—they might have known it. The one encounter they never could have envisaged, something utterly against all probability. They walked out of the dark cinema straight into the afternoon glare and his son. They showed themselves off; to his son.
The instinct was to go to her cottage and hide. Sonny was silent, his eyes concealed from Hannah, as he could do, drawing his thick eyebrows down around their deep darkness. She was afraid. But he did not leave her, he did not say you have destroyed my family. She saw how he had changed; how she had changed him without knowing. They talked of the Italian film and not about the boy. He embraced her passionately before he left her in the early evening and went back to his family; he must already have made up his mind, calmly, how he would deal with his son. He said only:—Don't worry. Not about Will, either.—
And however it was that he managed, it was clear, later, that the boy never said anything—to his mother, to anyone. —He didn't mention it to you?—
—No. It's as if it never happened.—
All Hannah said was:—That can't be.—
 
 
The room was not an everywhere because it could not contain the commonplaces of being together, the boring humdrum pleasures, the very state of daily deadened life their relationship escaped and was superior to, the state—of marriage?
From the surety of having everything, they had changed to wanting everything. Even that. They began to make more little excursions outside her bed and the cottage. She had a friend who was an absentee farmer. They went to picnic on the farm.
At the beginning of the drive the freeway took them past the Reef town in whose area for his kind he had grown up, taught school, shopped trailing his children on Saturday mornings … as he turned his head to watch glint past the lake made of pumped water from the mines, the buff yellow slopes of abandoned dumps, he had the tingling feeling of the unaccountable familiarity of a foreign country. She promised him fields of sunflowers because he liked so much the Van Gogh reproduction that was stuck up in her tiny kitchen among the drawings made by black children. But she had mistaken the season. The sunflower fields were a vast company of the dead, with black faces bowed. She swung against him in contrition as they walked through the veld; they laughed and kissed. He got splinters of fibre in his hands as he picked a dead flower for her, a souvenir.
He had such good alibis. Like all lovers, they longed to sleep together for a whole night, nights. Sonny could be absent from home without explanation, and the old restrictions of colour were abolished in most hotels and resorts. So they were free; once they spent two days of this kind of freedom somewhere in the Eastern Transvaal, and even stood among white Sunday families with grannies and squealing children, watching the young hatch on a crocodile farm. After intervals imposed by Sonny's political obligations—and neither he nor she ever neglected their work—and when another kind of absence from home could be justified by these demands, they went away together, even if sometimes only for a night. He had promised her a whole weekend again, and he managed it, not without some embarrassing lying to be done, to his comrades—a pretence, to them as well, that he would be incommunicado because of some contacts to be made about which he couldn't talk. When he left his home on Saturday morning he had, for the first time,
instead of euphoria inside him, a surly unease; there was a moment, as his son stood back as he passed him in the passage, when he almost turned and put down that briefcase (briefcase!) and didn't leave. But the moment was forgotten as soon as he left the house. In a rondavel resort among orange blossom near Rustenburg Sonny and Hannah were unspeakably happy. People say one could die for such happiness, but one also could kill for it, kill all other claims on oneself by people who have failed to bring it about. The scent of orange blossom was air itself, night and day, every drawn breath like the manifest emanation of private happiness, the wafting secretion of their one body, joined in love-making.
When Sonny came back on Sunday night he found his daughter had cut her wrists.
That didn't put an end to it. What Baby did that time.
We were sitting in the kitchen, my mother and I—as if we were back in the old place at Benoni—when we heard him come home. We heard the briefcase put down and the creak of his soles, we were so quiet because Baby was asleep down the passage with her bandaged wrists laid outside the sheet. My mother stood up and went to stop him coming into the kitchen where I was. I heard her soft voice telling him—and then suddenly, high:—Don't!—as his tread broke out hard and fast along the passage.
He came back slowly, and into the kitchen. He had seen my sister but not wakened her. My mother was sitting there again. I was with her, I had been with her ever since it happened, he had to face me. And I to face him. He wandered to the fridge and poured himself his glass of water. I wanted to laugh and knock it out of his hand. He stood there drinking and his head moved, he was not exactly shaking it, it moved vaguely like the involuntary movement of an old man. But it's no good putting
on a performance for me, he was not a poor distraught old father, he was only too strong and healthy, a fucker. What could my father say? If Baby had died on Saturday he wouldn't have been there. Couldn't be reached. He made sure of that. Nobody knew where he was. My mother was the one who saw the blood. And I.
—Will there be scars.—
That was all he could dare to say.
And it didn't stop him, it didn't stop them. It only made me cruel. That Sunday night. I wanted to go to my room and take out from behind my old soccer boots and roller skates—kid's things you never throw away—the dead head of a sunflower, and fling it at him.
He never tried to explain anything. He no longer cared enough for us to feel the need—to try and make us understand what had happened to him. Oh he was shattered that night and there was no-one to help him. The three of us were in the kitchen together, and he was alone. I had thought—had I?—he would break down and confess, we would weep, it would be all over, he would take my mother in his arms, she would take him in her arms. ‘Will there be scars': that's all. Our presence, my mother's and mine, drove him away alone to the sitting-room, that he and my mother had been so proud of, a decent place for her, at last. He sat there alone in the dark. She put milk on the stove to heat and I watched her make cocoa and take it in there, to him. I don't know if he said anything to her. She seemed to know he wouldn't eat. Still so considerate of him, my mother; still so respectful of this husband and father who had gone to prison for the future of our kind.
Baby was his favourite child—I always knew that—his daughter was his darling, his beauty, even though he quoted Shakespeare to me and wanted me to bring him glory by growing
up to be a writer just to please him. But although the child he used to be so in love with had now wanted, even if only for a mad moment, to die, and no-one dared get her to say why, he couldn't come back to her. He couldn't stay in the house with us. When my sister was ‘better'—what she had done to herself became an illness or accident that had happened to her, that was the only way we could deal with it in our house—she and my mother and father discussed what she wanted to
do
. All was resolved as a matter of the right occupation. And he was the one to know all about guidance, career guidance, he was once a schoolteacher. Her whole future before her etc.; the usual parents' stuff, as if they were the usual parents. My sister fell in with the spirit of the performance. I heard her say it, Oh she was sick of studying. She wanted to take a job. For a while; she'd study again later. (This thrown in, I know, for darling daddy and his old ambitions for his children to be useful, therefore educated, citizens.) She knew my mother wouldn't believe her, my mother knew she would find some other life, unplanned for her. He knew, surely, that something had driven her out; he didn't stay to find out why. He fled the house again with that briefcase—did my father keep a toothbrush in it or was he so thick with that woman that he used hers?
And what I couldn't get over was how my sister made it easy for him. Perhaps she did it for my mother's sake, too, but the fact is it had the effect of letting him off the misery he was sentenced to those first few days; she made it possible for that to be shed with her bandages. She appeared with brightly-painted wooden bracelets on each wrist—African artifacts. He didn't have to see the scars. She has beautiful straight shiny hair, like my mother's, and she had it frizzed; in her ‘convalescence' she went about the house, one of my old shirts tied under her naked breasts, midriff showing, her Walkman hooked
to a wide belt and plugged into her ears, moving her hips and head to a beat no-one else could hear. It was tacitly accepted that these were signs of a natural girlish independence; she wanted to earn her own living, she had offered.
She talked to
me
about that Saturday night as if it were some particularly daring party escapade to boast about. I couldn't see how she'd want to; she should have talked to
him,
really, it was his affair just like his other affair. She was determined to bring it up with me.—You never open your mouth, but I suppose you wonder why anyone'd do such a stupid thing.—
—Like what?—But she knew I was stalling; and she didn't want to come right out with it, either—‘trying to kill myself'.
—I'd had a bust-up with Marcia, she's always so nosy, like into everything, sticky fingers getting in my hair. I don't know why I let her pester me to spend the night, anyway. And the crowd that turned up at her place because they knew her folks were away, Jimmy and Alvin and that lot. I can't stand them, really. She said Jackie and Dawn and them (how many years had my father spent trying to get his Baby to drop her peers' bad grammar) were coming but she's a liar, she did it to persuade me to stay with her, because they never came. What was there to do but smoke. So I was rather stoned, and on top of it, when I wanted to get away from them and their lousy yakking and yelling and dancing like a pack of drunk wildebeest, there was a couple busy on the bed. They hadn't even shut the door.—
I nodded and kept my head turned away. She saw I didn't want to be presented with this version, this performance—another one, in our house.
—The bathroom was the only place to get away.—
The packet of Gillette Sword, the dagga and the self-pity. I wish I didn't have so much imagination, I wish that other people's lives were closed to me.
—They just made me sick. Sick of them.—
Now I knew what Baby was really telling me. I knew who ‘they' were; known to us both, not the crowd at Marcia's place on a Saturday night who were not my crowd.
She wanted some response to help her inveigle me—her innocent dumb brother—into an attitude she wanted me to adopt. She was trying buddy-buddy with me.
I only listened; she had to say herself what she hoped I would.—I suppose I could have gone home. It's not far. But you can imagine the fuss, with Ma, me arriving at two in the morning when she thinks I'm tucked up giggling in bed with a bosom friend. That's the problem with not having your own place. Living with the family. Parents, okay. Even the best parents in the world, we're different, not like them. Once you're grown up you've got to forget about their life. Let them have it, it's their business and you've got your own life to live. You have to have a place.—She looked at me to see if she was succeeding. —Can't go running to them, they've got a life of their own.—
Now she chattered away from what she had got said, gabbling about the flat in another grey area she and Jackie and Dawn and two Indian fellows, probably, were going to share, they'd take her in as soon as she got a job, and I understood what she'd been telling me when she was supposed to be confessing why she wanted to die on a Saturday night among strangers. Baby was covering up for him, again. My father. She was warning me off: his life. Poor Baby. His Baby, still.
He was able to forget so quickly.
She encouraged him—she's just like him, after all, although she looks like my mother, she's devious and lying as he is. She found a job with an insurance agent (I think one of the fellows who were sharing the flat and perhaps she was sleeping with
him) and she would come flying into the house when it suited her, bringing flowers or a ripped hem for my mother to mend, hooking an arm round my father's neck and kissing his ear, if he happened to be there, and calling, if he was not—as she left, her mouth full of some of my mother's goodies she was carrying away:—Don't forget to give Pa my love!—She was pretty and talkative and amusing, mimicking and laughing and begging for gossip about family and friends she never saw, any more.
I don't know whether my mother ever told him what Dr Jasood said about her animation. Her vulgarity splashed all over my mother. Yet she said to me more than once—As long as Baby's busy and happy—My mother, too, was saying something else: that since nothing could be done about Dr Jasood's diagnosis of my sister's state, my mother was thankful she was proving resilient enough to divert it to some purpose of her own.
You would have thought nothing had happened. We settled into an uncanny sort of normality, an acceptance of the rearrangement of our lives to
his
convenience. I know for a fact that several times he took my mother to gatherings at the house of some white people where that woman of his was also present. My mother had to sit down and eat with her.
And I have been to where she lives. Where he goes to her. He sent me. Could you believe it?
 
 
There was someone who always knew where Sonny was.
The Security Police. He knew that, Hannah knew that. It did not count as witness, as intrusion. The Security Police work secretly as any love affair.
A man who has been convicted of a crime against the State will continue to be watched as long as his life or the State that
convicted him lasts; whichever endures the longer. A woman who associates with such a man will be watched. The third presence in the lovers' privacy is the Security Police; anonymous, unseen: a condition of the intimacy of political activists. The men who had taken Sonny away and locked him up in detention, knew. Knew about him. Were in it with him. It was not in their interest to blow this kind of cover. If he had been an important revolutionary figure they (easily) might have arranged with a country hotel to bug the rondavel, and leaked tapes to the Sunday press to smear his character. They could have got the Minister to place a ban on his movements. But they did not, because while he was without restriction, running to the rendezvous of his lady-love, he might also lead them to those of his underground associates still unknown to them.
After what nearly happened that Saturday night (this was the only way he could allow himself to formulate it) Sonny realized that someone else ought to know where he could be found. In case something actually happened. There in the house. But to whom could he go? Whom could he tell, if my daughter is bleeding to death in the bathroom, fetch me from this address? If Aila collapses in that kitchen, if he—Will—gets electrocuted fixing a light-plug, call me from Hannah's bed, close to the earth. He would be driving alone—once it was to the ghettos of the Vaal Triangle, where the community organizations' rent boycott was becoming a major campaign, he was thinking how best to respond to their problems of spontaneous violence against corrupt councillors—and, suddenly, he would have an impulse to lift his hands from the steering-wheel. Let go. The car skidding, careering, turning over and over, taking him. He would gain control of himself in a sweat. Had not let go; had not let his mind swerve back to what might have happened that Saturday night.
Hannah did not know about these moments—it was perhaps the first thing ever he kept from her—but she had the instinct, for her own protection, that he ought to be encouraged to talk about his daughter—Baby. The very name of the girl came awkwardly from him: Hannah saw he was hearing it now as he imagined she must—silly, sugary, cheap lower-class sentimentality of the ignorant poor in the ghetto of a small town where you couldn't even use the library. It embarrassed him to realize, indeed, how stupidly, crassly, the substitute for a name was stuck upon the grown girl. The woman; a woman, now, like Aila and like Hannah.—D'you remember her at all, dancing, the night you were at my house for a party?—
—Of course.—How could she not remember every detail of that party, the second time only that she had seen in their own home the family to which he belonged by right, and when he was still, just out of prison, a materialization she couldn't take her eyes off.
—The party the women arranged, music and so on.—
—Yes, you invited me …—
—I saw the fellows looking at her, you know …the way men look at women, and I looked too and saw her little round backsides, the cheeks, riding up and down in that skirt or dress, whatever it was, and nipples showing under thin stuff as she moved—
—And how fantastically she moved!—Hannah wanted to coax him to laugh with her and accept lightly what he was innocently confessing, that he had been sexually stirred by his daughter.
—That little girl who used to make me ashtrays out of back-yard mud although I never smoked. She was a lovely young woman. Even though I say it, she was beautiful, hey, and a lovely expression, too. So full of spirit.—

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