Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

You might have been aware, I think you were aware the last time you were in London that things were not going too well. Alice made me promise we’d keep up the appearance and I gave in — mistakenly, I believe, but when you’re what’s known as the guilty party (that’s my designation with the lawyers …) you try to make small concessions in order not to seem too much of a bastard. I should have known better, not so? Alice was plotting, poor thing, I suppose, every kind of delaying tactic she could think of. I sometimes wish you could be here now to tell her what people like you and I accept, that if you didn’t exactly tell Annie and me, we somehow learned from you about emotions — you can’t fake love. If it’s gone it’s gone. She wants me to stay with her, she says she doesn’t ask me to love her. She’s grown to be the kind of woman who’s content to be used like a prostitute, I should go on sleeping with her for god knows what — hygienic reasons, what she thinks of as the sexual needs of men that have nothing to do with love. She doesn’t understand for a moment that the idea fills me with disgust. I don’t want a vessel for my sex. Vera, I’ve outgrown her, she’s the little girl I took to school dances. For a long time I’ve had nothing I could discuss with her, not my work, not what’s in the newspapers, not my ideas about life. If it’s not concerning Adam, his earache, his school marks, whether he needs a new tennis racket, there’s nothing. I can’t live like that and I’m not going to be party to her weak choice to do so.

I have another woman. Have had, of course, for a long time. She hasn’t pressed me into divorcing Alice, I can tell you that. She’s not the type to go in for emotional blackmail. She’s a Hungarian redhead, if you want to know what she looks like (!), half-Jewish, and she’s very bright, an investment banker. There’s no messy tangle on her side, her husband died at thirty-nine five years ago, a brain tumour. No children. I don’t know whether to contest Alice over Adam. He’s almost grown up. She’s got a strong case for custody, but doesn’t an adolescent boy need a father, more? Difficult for me to judge, because I had both. All the old clichés of what’s best for him etc. Sometimes I just want to get out, I’d agree to anything. Other times, I feel bad about the boy. This is beginning to sound like one of the soap operas Alice watches on tele and quickly switches off when I come in, to pretend she doesn’t. No doubt every divorce is a soap opera. And you get addicted to your own soap opera, never mind the important things that are happening in the world. I’ve just come back from Moscow, the refinancing of part of the arms industry to make vehicle components, the swords into ploughshares operation. But it’s so much more profitable to sell arms, and they need money, no financial aid consortium can give them what can be earned by selling to the Middle East. I’m enclosing a photograph. We’re at some dinner in Budapest a few months ago. She’s the redhead next to the fat man standing up making a speech.

But there was no photograph. He must have thought better of it; had the instinct that a photograph, a face ringed, is no way to announce a betrayal.

When she heard Ben come in, his relaxed home-coming sigh as he paused in the passage at the bookshelf where the day’s mail was always left, her concourse alone with Ivan’s letter sank away; the reason why Ivan didn’t write to Ben was because Ben is his father, of course, must be; he knows how deeply Ben loves him, and doesn’t want to upset him with the sudden evidence of any unhappiness or instability in his son’s life.

Vera threw away the envelope.

Who are the faces arranged in a collage round the great man himself? The posters are curling at the corners and some have faded strips where sunlight from a window has barred them day after day, month after month. Crowds who dance their manifesto in the streets are too young to recognize anyone who dates from the era before exile unless he is one of the two or three about whom songs were sung and whose images were kept alive on T-shirts. Didymus went about mostly unrecognized; disguised, now, as himself.

In the ranks of the entourage at mass rallies the cheers and chants fell pleasingly on him among other veterans as a category to whom this sort of valediction was due; it didn’t matter who they were individually. The press mixed up the attribution of names and that didn’t matter either. In a democratic movement the personality cult must be kept to a minimum, except in the case of dead heroes, who are an example to the people without any possibility of leading a tendency or faction that might be divisive. The time of welcoming posters was over; there were many new faces, or the unexpected appearance of known ones in positions they had not held previously. But these positions were interim ones — more or less on the level of his own adaptation to a variety of impermanent roles.

When the date was announced of the congress at which the Movement’s elections for office would take place, lobbying began, of course. Among the strong group to which he belonged, those returned from prison and from experience as a government in exile, the concern — not to be admitted outside their own ranks — was how to concede positions to those who had earned them by keeping the Movement alive within the country, while retaining key positions for those who had surely earned them by conducting the Movement from exile or prison. Women’s groups, youth groups, trade union groups were busy gathering support for this or that candidate; the old guard welcomed the influx as affirming a new kind of mass base after so many years of clandestinity. They had no need to fear they would not be returned to office — loyalty to the most militant is a dominant emotion in the masses; deserved; to be counted on. Meanwhile Didymus made it quietly but firmly known that on the new National Executive he would not expect to continue doing whatever came up. He would get the legal department, or at least something on that level; it was tacitly assured by his comrades on the outgoing Executive that this went without saying.

Among the possible newcomers Sibongile was nominated by a combination of returnees and a women’s organization, neither very prominent as yet. He didn’t think she had much chance but was proud of the recognition nomination, at least, brought her.

— They’ve put me up only because I’m a woman — I’m wise to that and I don’t think it’s a good enough reason. The women just want to see one of us there among you men.—

— Of course the women have. But not your returnees. They know what you’re capable of, they know what you can do.—

— For them? Well, then they know more than I do. — Her theatrical, comic stare. — All I know is how we allowed the government to get away with giving us amnesties and passports and nothing else. All I know is we didn’t hold out for training centres, housing — your executive didn’t insist, it was up to you. In my office, with three raw youngsters and a pittance, I’m trying to deal with the results — and believe me, I’m not making miracles.—

Didymus had always appreciated her vehemence. He acknowledged the reproach, smiling. — I promise you I’ll take it up in the new executive.—

What has been forbidden for so long — a gathering, any gathering — becomes a kind of fairground of released emotion, with its buskers, its symbolic taking, together, of food and drink, its garrulous decibels rising after long silence, its own insigniabanded marshals mingling as if already the unattainable evolution of humankind has arrived, where men and women discipline themselves. No more police, no more dogs, no more tear-gas, no more beatings on the way to the Black Maria. Even if it never comes, it is enacted here and now. And as always in the mix of human affairs the tension in the sense that the future of the country is being decided is combined with dissatisfaction with the catering and discomfort occasioned by a hopeless provision of too few toilets.