Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

The undertone of a shy young woman was speaking of brutality. — So you see, Mrs Stark, I mean they’s upgraded Phambili Park, sewerage and that, and we all building, but now the men from the hostels is just coming to run all over, the women from the squatters’ place is sitting in the veld right there by our houses — what can a person say to them? They frightened. Like we. We frightened, too. Last week two nights there was shooting, the men from the hostel was chasing someone—

How was it—‘I’ve got Alice to agree to a divorce.’ The sight of his handwriting on the envelope is already a signal of something unusual to be conveyed; a banker so successful that he is going back and forth from London to Poland, Hungary and Russia to negotiate new banking alliances doesn’t have time to lick stamps personally. As if she were saying it to Ben now, she heard herself, when Ivan came back to South Africa and married his schooldays girl: He’ll stay with her as long as he’s not successful.

— so I was scared, I can tell you, I was so scared, and my mom, we just hid there without the lights while there was running and screaming, terrible, and then that noise, that noise! something falling hard, just like that, heavy at the door, so I thought what if it’s Colin, he wasn’t home yet—

Billboards on bare ground proclaimed the right to shelter elevated to middle-class status. Easy Loans Available, Protea Grove, Blue Horizon, Hill Park, you too can say you live in a place with a beautiful name like a white suburb, you too can feel you are making a claim for yourself when your address is Phambili Park — forward, let us go forward! Now on the horizon, a vast unloading of scrap without any recognizable profile of human habitations, now at the roadside, the jagged tin and tattered plastic sheets that are the architecture of the late twentieth century as marble was the material of the Renaissance, glass and steel that of Mies van der Rohe; the squatter camps, the real Post-Modernism: of the homeless.

— Oh sorry — turn here, no, left, sorry— Such an apologetic young woman, with her oval face, varnished olive by the mixture of races, in its corolla of springy black hair. Is she apologizing for existing at all, neither white and living far from the wrath that overflows from the black hostels into a fake suburbia nor black and fleeing into the veld from a burning shack? — and I heard someone groaning there outside and what can I do, my mom was trying to stop me, I thought what if it’s Colin so even I get killed I must—

Ben was shocked. That’s not the kind of attitude you’d expect to have towards young married people. Hurt. Ben, who had been Bennet, the young man who took someone else’s wife while the man was away at war, had fear disguised as disapproval in his face, the withdrawal in his eyes in their dark caves. He did not want his son to suffer any complications in the search for sexual fulfilment and companionship that beckons from that other billboard: Happiness.

On a straggle of wire clothes were dripping, a woman flung a basin of water to the ground and looked up, a white flag on a dead-branch pole announced something to the initiated — a healer or some other form of counsel for sale, or maybe mealies to be bought — above a shack leaning like a house of cards. Business going on; straggling letters on board or wavering across the corrugations of tin, New York Gents Tailor, Dry Cleaning Depot, Latest Hairstyle Braiding Afro Relaxing, Mosala Funerals, Beauty Salon, a shutter propping up an eyelid of tin where a handful of cigarettes, a few bottles of bright drinks, twists of snuff and dice of chewing gum were ranged. Store. Coal Wood. Turn here. Turn there. Oh Mrs Stark. Combis have widened and channelled the dirt road to the passage of a river in flood, the Legal Foundation station-wagon is carried along, keeping track as the combis draw level so close the elbow of the driver out of his window almost touches the arm of the station-wagon’s outside mirror; held back when the combis stop at speed, without warning, to take on or discharge a passenger.

— Oh Mrs Stark, I tell you a person can’t go through that, he can’t. When I saw it wasn’t Colin, when I opened the door just a bit and I saw the head, the black man, blood, and the brains—

Crying, and all she has to deal with the shock and horror come back to her in the telling is a fancy handkerchief patterned with a pierrot’s head, his two crystal tears printed tinsel: Mrs Stark sees as she turns in the gesture of acknowledgement that is all Mrs Stark has to deal with it. For the moment; the Foundation must not flounder in effects, it tackles causes.

— like at the butcher’s shop, I never knew our brains was like that—

There is no stain on the doorstep. Neither blood nor the red-veined jelled grey displayed in shallow pans. All has been scrubbed away in the desperate upkeep of housewifely standards. A tall woman is waiting, bony in the way that often comes to African fleshiness from the mixture with European blood, and prematurely aged (she could probably give Mrs Stark a year or two) by the determination to defeat poverty by the virtues of fastidious cleanliness and decency believed to belong without effort to people with money, the rewards of being white. The door is not that of a house but the side-door of a garage; a stove, refrigerator, TV, beds, the family is living there. — Colin’s doing the house on weekends, oh it’s over a year now, a slow business! — The older woman insists on making tea, there’s a granadilla cake with yellow icing, she breaks in for emphasis: —His brother-in-law, my other daughter’s husband, he’s in the trade, and there’s others in the family comes to plaster and so on.—

— Sundays it’s quite a party! — Distracted from her tears by the comfort of pride, the young one shows Mrs Stark over what will be her house one day, Sunday by Sunday, the breakfast nook, Colin’s clever with his hands he’s doing the table himself, the master bedroom (she calls it), the kids here, with an entrance to the yard for them, the living-dining’s going to have a hatch counter to the kitchen, ma’s room with a separate bathroom and that, this’s the foundation for a patio and braai. The visitor is led outside again to admire the façade. There is no roof yet but on the unplastered wall where the window frames are paneless the replica of a brass carriage lamp is in place just as if it were standing to light the pillared entrance to a white man’s driveway.

The assertion of this half-built house is so undeniable that both women feel an unreality in returning to the object of Mrs Stark’s presence, which was supposed to be an inquiry into what happened in Phambili Park the night a man was murdered on the young woman’s doorstep. This sort of investigation was not normally within the purview of the Foundation, but on this occasion, as increasingly lately, the connection between the people who had been removed from a site and squatted near Phambili Park because they had nowhere else to go, and the violence from hostel dwellers they were subject to, pursuing them, the disruption this in turn caused residents in a legally proclaimed, upgraded etc. township, was relevant to the Foundation’s case against the removal. The young woman leads Mrs Stark up and down roads in the veld drawn by the rough fingernail of an earth-mover. Woodpecker tapping — building going on wherever you look — the veld an endless offering to the infinity of light that is a clear Transvaal sky, scaffolding standing out in the exaggerated perspective of bareness, de Chirico, Dali, thought they imagined it, Munch saw open-mouthed women fleeing in space from dingy, smoke-smouldering encrustation of shanties, there, over there. But where is Europe, what place has the divorce of a banker in the mind of anyone picking a way over rubble and weeds to the neat hallucination of small houses with their fancy burglar grilles, and flowered bedsheets hung out to dry, someone speaking to families living in garages while the habitation that has existed over years, in their minds, is slowly materialized in walls rising at the rate at which money is saved and free Sundays are available. The normality in these homes — camping out in the garage is home, because it is the first occupation of what has existed in mind — is also hallucinatory. So what is normality? Isn’t it just the way people manage to live under any particular circumstance; the children who are teetering a stolen supermarket trolley under the weight of two drums of water back to the squatter camp (one of the Phambili Park residents’ complaints is that the squatters come over to use their taps) — the children are performing a normal task in terms of where and how they live. They yell and pummel one another, tumbling about as they go. A carriage lamp is the blazon of aspiration, fixed to the wall where a mob smashes a man’s head in.