Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

But she was alone. He didn’t know the man, Zeph Rapulana. He hadn’t stood before Odendaal’s anger, Odendaal’s barred door, with him, made decisions affecting families with him, hadn’t come to read the dignity, the shrewdness of confidence and intelligence in that calm black face of the man. She drove first to the empty Foundation — no one at work yet — to pick up documents relating to the Odensville affair. Well along the highway, she remembered she had not left a note, and turned off at a petrol station to telephone her office. The young switchboard operator could hear the voices of the petrol attendants, laughing and arguing over a game of cards set out on the ground, and the jabber from their radio. — Where you partying already, in the day, Mrs Stark!—

She drove; a mind caged back and forth between the witness of the empty office where Zeph Rapulana had talked reason and strategy, the desk from which she had sent the letter to the TPA, and the collage, made up of so many press photographs, so many leaping and falling, running figures on TV, so many burning shacks, so many dead slumped on the earth as so many bundles of blood-stained washing. There was no connection. Before a reply to the letter, hers and Rapulana’s, could be received through the authorities, before bureaucracy had ‘taken steps’, the solution to everything had taken steps — deaths, again deaths.

The car door slammed behind her outside the district police station with the blow of sun striking her with dizziness of the long solitary drive. Dust, sparkle of the wire security fence; she passed under a drowsy-lidded gaze of a black policeman with his sub-machine-gun hitched on his stout thigh. Inside, a white policeman, elbows on the counter and forearms shielding his flirtatious face over the telephone, was engaged in one of those calls made up of sniggering silences and intimately curt remarks between young men and girls. Another policeman was standing before a filing cabinet, smoking and hesitating over papers. While she questioned him he continued to glance sideways at this sheet and that; shrugged without answering and called towards an open doorway through which someone of more senior rank appeared. He was a handsome Afrikaner with a glossy moustache and a Napoleon haircut, a well-groomed stallion of the kind with a special manner when dealing with women, since he felt himself to be pleasing to them somewhere under their complaint or distress, like it or not, in their female innards. Even to this tannie 3 he extended the patronage, listening to her rap of questions with the air, yes, yes, he knew how to deal with over-anxious ladies concerned about their black servants. That business with the squatters last night; nine deaths confirmed but no names available, the bodies still to be identified — if the relatives can be found, you never know with them, they’re spread around in these camps. He scribbled the name of the Foundation without reaction to her revealed connection with that trouble-making organization; yes yes they could phone and ask for him personally, yes yes ready to be of any assistance. He cuffed the head of the young man at the telephone as he passed to his office.

She drove to a complex of garage, chain restaurant and restrooms in a loop off the highway and found a bank of telephones. At the store, someone who sounded like a child listened, breathing gustily, and then put aside the receiver. Vera called loudly, hullo! hullo! possessed by a useless impatience with everyone, the police, the unknown storekeeper, the wild-goose chase of calling culpability to account, finding interstices in official obduracy and solutions to ignorance of the uneducated that was, had been so long, her working life. The gaping receiver at the other end of the line, the background noises lazily conveyed, ignoring her — this was nothing but another customary irritation, but it brought her to despair and destroyed the control within which she held the fact of nine unnamed dead. If that child had been within reach she would have struck it. Violence boiled up in her from somewhere. If Odendaals kill, kill back. If they killed that good man, why not deal back death to them — she understood with all her impatient angry flesh the violence that, like others, she called mindless. When the receiver was picked up she gave her name and business testily. A man’s soft hoarse voice said no, it’s all right, my cousin is well, everything it’s all right, nothing is happen, if you want see him I can send someone—

She was given instructions to find her way to the shop. Lost, turned back by police road-blocks, she found another route— there it was, so that was it, she remembered dropping him off at that store the first day when they had left Odendaal’s house.

He was there, standing, waiting for her, wearing a tie, right arm in a sling and, oozing through gauze, the pursed red lips of a deep cut drawn together by surgical clips on the black flesh of his cheek. Smiling.

She was overcome by a kind of shyness, because the man was alive. She began to shiver — not tremble — it was the quivering wave that comes when you give way to fear or are going to be sick. Certainty that he had been killed by Odendaal, that she had not allowed to rise in her, now struck at the sight of him.

— I’m so sorry. You were worried. My cousin told me. — A gentle and calm voice.

She stood there, someone dropped from another planet, the outer space of safety, in the dim little store’s light moted by the dust of grain and spilt sugar, thick with the closed-in smells of the night, snuff, soap, sweat-dried secondhand shoes and army surplus coats, mouse-droppings and paraffin. He saw, came over at once and with his left hand strangely clasped her forearm above the wrist, held it there, between them. Tentatively, her other hand came to rest over his.

He tramped before her to a shed behind the shop. There were plastic chairs and a bed in disarray where someone had slept. He turned off a radio and gave some instruction to a child who brought cups of sweet milky tea.

She didn’t ask whether the squatters had approached Odendaal’s house armed with stones and weapons. She didn’t ask if he led them. He told drily, now and then touching with a middle finger along the gash on his cheek, how Odendaal and his commando had gone through the squatters’ shacks, firing, dragging people out. A pause, tracing the gash. A considering, rumbling murmur, expressive in his own language, that she understood from experience with blacks who have status in their communities as always some sort of warning or preparation for what was about to be said. — Now Administration will act. Now they’ll have to buy his land. No more trouble for him. Lucky Odendaal. He’ll get money, plenty of money, he’ll be happy. And the land—

Their eyes held, and shifted.

— Nine dead, so we’ll get it. — Now it was possible to say this to this man. — We’ll have to make sure it’s for occupation by your people there, no one else.—

— Quickly. When shall I come to the office? I’d better bring the Chief with me, it’s always better for Pretoria if anything is backed by a chief. First I have to make the funeral arrangements.—

She had no preparatory murmur such as he could use. — Perhaps near escapes from death are always a resurrection. Perhaps that’s how the whole legend of Christ rising from the tomb came about — I was thinking, they took him down from the cross and couldn’t believe he wasn’t dead, couldn’t believe he was there, alive, in front of them … that was the resurrection, really. The whole tomb story, the miracle came from that. — Then she remembered he was probably religious. When they first met, that day they went to see Odendaal, the man had about him the kind of modest self-righteousness, prim bearing, an overlay on the African spirit that regular church-going seems to bring about in rural people; at the roadside he sat circumspectly as if he were in a pew. This surface had burned off like morning fog in the heat of the events in which he was involved, as she had come to know him — or rather as he had come to reveal himself released by that involvement. Yet beliefs inculcated in childhood often remain uncontradicted by mature reasoning and experience. He might be offended by a Christian heretic’s doubts of Christ’s divine powers.