Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

She lay beside him stiffly, breathing fast. — I don’t sleep. I can’t turn over and forget about it.—

— Listen, woman. — He sat up with effort. — You are going to be there, now. In there. Here at home in the country. Keep your mind on what you have to do, you have to work with everyone on the Executive, don’t make enemies for private reasons.—

She came back to English. — On principle. Ever heard of it, Didymus. On principle. —

— You’ve got a lot to learn. Let me look after my own affairs.—

— Your affairs are my affairs. Have I lived like any other woman, hubby coming home regularly from work every day? Have I known, months on end, whether you were dead or alive? Tell me. And could I ask anybody? Did I ever expect an answer? Could I tell our child why her father left her? Our affairs. —

— Not now. Not in politics, where you are now.—

Deep breaths snagged on a few sobs. She had always wept when she was angry. But was she also giving vent to the emotions of excitement and pride she had repressed out of consideration for him, when in the hall filled with delegates she heard that she was one of their chosen?

We don’t seem to have much success with them. All he said.

— What d’you mean? Banking may not be exactly what you or I would have chosen for him, but he’s good at it, and Annie always wanted to be a doctor, she’s doing good work isn’t she, her heart’s in it— But she knew what he meant. Annick, inheritor of his beautiful face, had brought many boys home when she was a teenager but since she had qualified and taken a post in community medicine in the Cape she appeared to have no man and in her thirties gave no sign of marrying; Ivan was getting divorced without showing enthusiasm for a new woman who evidently was as much business associate as lover. Arid lives, by Ben’s hidden standards of high emotion.

— Well I don’t suppose we were such a good example — at least to Ivan.—

— I’ve never been divorced.—

The forgotten heat of blush, called up by Ben in her cheeks: Bennet, who thought he had seduced someone’s wife but had been seduced by her, and never since made love to another woman. That she was sure of, the certainty was there in the image bent alone over a meal in a restaurant that came back to her with blood in her face. I love you. That was in the blood, too, but she could not say it, what reason would he find for such a — declaration, at this moment? What reason was there? — Anyway, it’s not whether or not we make a success of their lives. Nothing to do with us.—

His palms smoothed along his jaw-line, a familiar gesture in the language of their marriage, not, as it might seem, a physical response to the shadow of his dark beard that by evening always had appeared again, but a sign of disagreement. — Maybe we should take the boy if they’re squabbling over him. Give him a stable home for a year or two.—

He went away to write a letter to Ivan, turning from what he knew was her alarmed silence.

Ben didn’t show her the letter and she did not ask to read it. Perhaps he had not made the offer to Ivan. It was not mentioned when Ivan telephoned, as he did now and then, or they called him because there had not been time or thought to write to him. The idea that there could be space in their life for something more was mislaid like a document lost in the bottom of the files where the struggle for another kind of space grew up every day around her. On the western border people from a tribe that had been moved with the concession that they could come back to their land to tend the graves of their ancestors for one day a year did not leave at nightfall but began to build huts. The sullen silence of reclaim met the arrival of authorities to evict them; they were left there — temporarily, the Foundation was warned, when it took up the issue on the appeal of the tribe. Vera and Lazar Feldman, a young colleague, found themselves proceeding from instructions of two kinds: one, from their own training in secular law, that the owners of the land had been displaced illegally in the first instance; the other, from the people who were thatching huts and surrounding them with fences of thorned branches and hacked-off prickly pear plants, that the instruction to return and take possession came from the ancestors.

It was easy to see this use of ancestor worship as a political tactic shrewd peasants had thought of beyond the rational ingenuity of lawyers; but there were moments when, listening to the people’s spokesmen, she felt confusion and uncertainty— not about them, but in herself; whether the only validity of their claim lay outside the political struggle, outside the challenging of laws made by governments that rise and fall, in the continuation of life itself from below and above the very ground that sustained it. What other claim is there that holds? The wars fought over land, the boundary proclamations, the paper deeds of sale — each cancels the other. What was she — the Foundation — working for, if not for that claim? But it didn’t look good enough in legal plea — peasant mysticism can’t be codified as a legal right — it was too good , for that. With a shift in a chair or a half-smile she and Lazar passed over the instruction from the ancestors and took that which came from their own strategical experience in opposing the law through its interstices, which consisted mainly in delaying tactics. The action of re-evicting the people would be held off — maybe so long that the present policies of land ownership would be torn up. Who knows? Such things are not discussed with Lazar; he is young, and would not understand that doubts do not mean that belief in the necessity of the work she does is abandoned. And even while this case was occupying her, Oupa came with a favoured opening: they’ve got a problem, we’ve got a problem, he’s got a problem. The owner of that apartment building where he was living was seeking the eviction of some tenants.

— The problem is, rooms on the roof. There are many people living up there.—

— But who pays rent for the rooms?—

— Well, that’s it. The tenants of the flats let them out to, say, one person or two. Then those people take in more. People who work in the day let the bed to people who work at night and sleep in the day. It’s like that.—

Yes, it was like that; when the apartments were built for white people, for their occupancy, their way of life, for the white millennium, when they lived in the apartments, each had the right to one of the rooms to accommodate a servant.

— I didn’t know about it. So I haven’t got anyone up there.—

They laughed together at the missed opportunity.

But the ‘problem’ remained, between them on Mrs Stark’s desk. Oupa had received an eviction order along with the other black tenants. The Foundation would have to look into it, take it up on behalf of them all. Oupa had been so proud, so happy to move in. Yet he was cheerful; she noticed he was wearing a new lumber-jacket, brown suede, and he asked his old adviser and friend something he’d never done before — she didn’t know he went to the theatre — whether a current play was to be recommended? He had about him the confidence of a young man elated to find himself attractive to a chosen girl; well, circumstance kept his wife away in another part of the country, absence makes room for other attachments, and perhaps they were parted, emotionally, by reasons only absence makes clear. She filed at court an intention to defend against the eviction order; she had to find time to interview the other tenants. Along the corridors of Delville Wood the old, faint signals from One-Twenty-One were jammed by the static of complaint, voluble indignation that buzzed about her in flats she had never before entered, and by the sight of the cubicles on the windswept roof, water dribbling from the communal washrooms, spirit stoves beside makeshift beds that in her clandestine occupancy of the white millennium had existed above her head while she was making love.