Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

— You want to know why she did it. I don’t know. I don’t know and you don’t know what we call living was like then. But you want to know who she was? — she was an attendant in a— what d’you call it — a public wash-place, a lavatory, she came from Bavaria. She had nothing, the only boast she could have — she would tell me my father must have been a good Nazi, chosen to give me a better brain, a better body, a chance — I don’t know — than any ordinary man.—

To remain in silence much longer would be interpreted as revulsion against him.

— The genes. I’m no Jewish victim. No Jew. I’m a German. That’s where I get the only name that belongs to me, the good German Otto my mother gave me. The genes are like the ones they have — the men who were beating up kids and shooting them.—

Vera said what came to her to be said. — Shave off the beard.—

And so there in the kitchen of One-Twenty-One the past was interpreted and shed, he clasped her fist as he had done that first time in her office, they returned to the beginning newly, over again, something based on a recognition so alien that it transformed the feel of his body, for her, and hers for him. There was no appropriate place for that curious passion to be enacted, and so it happened in the kitchen, she took him in through the aperture of clothes pulled out of the way, standing up where they had risen from the kitchen table, they were clutched like a pillar shaking in an earth tremor, and never before or after in her life was she, in her turn, transformed, and fused with a man in such blazing sensation.

That was the day and place of betrayal of Ben, Bennet, the chosen man.

Bitch.

Many years later, Otto Abarbanel has long left, and occasional meetings abroad, telephone calls from remote places, letters, have ended, and all sense of touch and feel associated with him seem to have returned to other responses as nerves regenerate after damage — that kitchen, One-Twenty-One Delville Wood, is still the day and place of betrayal, as a battlefield never loses its association. And that is why when Ben comes in with his offering of wine, Vera, spreading apart hands innocently soiled, a knife in one, suddenly drops her housewifely task, comes towards him, and embraces him.

Does the past return because one can rid oneself of it only slowly, or is the freedom actually the slow process of loss?

What she remembered while Ben uncorked the wine and joked with Oupa — come into the kitchen fondly steering a giggling young woman who protested in Tswana — was driving with Otto Abarbanel into the city one summer day and passing a restaurant where through the open doorway she saw Ben. In that moment before the traffic bore her on she could not possibly have recognized anyone but him, matching one whose unique features and bodily outline she carried within her.

He was bent over his plate, his dark head down and shoulders curved. He was alone. By the sight of him she was overcome with desolation, premonition like the nausea of one about to faint. How could he look so solitary? Did all the years together mean nothing? A childish fear of abandon drained her. His lowered head and bowed shoulders knew without knowing that he was no longer her lover. His aloneness was hers; not here, not now, but somewhere waiting.

Under banners on posters in the offices of Movement Headquarters, just opened in the city, on photographs in progressive journals and newspapers, Didymus appeared among others released from prison or returned from exile. Our leaders, our heroes. Who would occupy which office and in what capacity could not be decided quickly after so long a period when there had been leadership dispersed between a number of representatives in different countries of exile, leadership confined in prison, and leaders in the front organizations which had grown up and survived within the country. He did whatever was needed, as everyone must. Sometimes he found himself arranging protocol and press conferences; then he was off to fulfil the request of some provincial branch for a speaker, he was in one of the first delegations to talk with white businessmen, he gave a graduation address at a college where the rector had hoped for some better-known face too busy to attend. But this was while it was taken as understood that his legal training rather than the avocation of clandestine missions he had carried out so successfully in the days of exile and underground activity would decide what position he would hold on the national executive in a time, now, when that formation was legal and the political ethos was negotiation, the grinning face at receptions in place of the disguised one moving in the streets.

— Jack of all trades! — Sally with her affectionately exaggerated shrug as a softener to her rising voice answered Vera when her friend asked what position Didy held now. A rap performer yammered into a microphone with the speed of a tobacco auctioneer; the Starks were come upon at the opening of an exhibition of painting and wood carving by black artists whose work had become fashionable since city corporations and white collectors had seen such acquisitions as the painless way to prove absence of racial prejudice. — And what a mob this is … all these cultural workers who’re ashamed to call themselves painters and writers. And the insurance bosses and bank PROs showing how they appreciate our black souls. Now for Christ’s sake don’t quote me, Ben! — I use that jargon around the office corridors, oh yes I hear myself … but thank God to find a businessman , dear Ben, among my friends in this crowd who don’t want to say what they are.—

Of course. The torsos are only part of the furnishings Sally knows well in the Stark house. No one singles out the identity —sculptor —of the one who shaped them, only he remembers the identity of the missing head, the complex nerve-centre of the woman he lives with and that he had given up (once, long ago) attempting to capture in its material form.

So Ben laughs with her. Of course.

— You don’t have any work going in your firm, do you?—

— Only the kind of thing you read in the Smalls. Some of my clients are in the mail order business. Money in your spare time selling from your own home — you know.—

— Most that we’re dealing with don’t have homes to sell from. But seriously … I’ve been meaning to get in touch with you, your advice about how we might set up some sort of liaison with business people, operating outside the usual employment-agency style, something more personal, tapping bad conscience … why not. I’ve been meaning to come round.—

The Starks and the Maqomas had not seen much of each other lately. Although Sibongile spoke of her job as if it were quite humble — it was the democratic vocabulary, hangover from exile with its brave denial of hierarchy — she was one who could not be reached except through a secretary these days. She had her offices and battery of command — computers, fax, assistants whose poor education and lack of skills she was attempting to tolerate while disciplining and training them. When there were complaints about her she said to her comrades in high positions what they themselves thought it better not to express. — I don’t want to be told I behave like an exploiter just so someone can go on sitting around filing her nails or someone who was once detained thinks he’s for ever entitled to disappear two hours for lunch. Comrades employed here are expected to have the will to work harder, not less than they would for some white boss. This’s not sheltered employment.—

The furnishing of the house was completed, if too sparsely for her taste; she liked beautiful objects, and some of those she had collected with little money saved while moving around in exile had had to be left behind. The daughter had been fitted out with all her mother needed to supply for the new school. There was a microwave oven installed in the kitchen so that she could leave a meal to be heated when she had an official obligation that meant she would be home only in time to find Didymus and her daughter in darkness lit up by a television film, or to take off her shoes and move about without disturbing the husband who, asleep, left space for her at his side. Home was set up; but she did not have time to do the daily tasks that would maintain it; it was Didymus who took the shopping lists she scribbled in bed at night, who drove Mpho to and from her modern dance class, to the dentist, to the urgent obligations that schoolgirls have to be here or there, it was he who called the plumber and reported the telephone out of order. His working day was less crowded than hers. She would be snatching up files, briefcase, keys in the morning while he was dipping bread in coffee, changing back and forth from local news broadcasts to the BBC. Their working life was housed in the same building; sometimes he came to look in on her office: she was talking fast on the telephone, held up a hand not to be interrupted, she was in the middle of briefing the fieldworkers through whom she had initiated research into the reintegration of returned exiles.