Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

He understood she was talking about — himself.

— I managed to drive. I took two of them to the hospital in my car. There’s blood all over. The woman died before we arrived around midnight. Yes … The youngster may be all right. That’s how I got this stitched up. — He moved his lower jaw against the stiffness of the flesh drawn together on his cheek.

In Vera’s car they went to what had been Odensville.

A stunned aftermath of disaster slowed the pace of existence to its minimum; people were breathing, just breathing. Children with lolling-headed babies on their backs sat about, there was no way of knowing whether outside where they had lived — every element that could identify shelter and possessions cast in turmoil. Dried tears were the salty tracks on the grey-black cheeks of women who must not be gazed at. Men wandered, turning over splintered wood, torn board, plastic burned black-edged into fantastic whorls and peaks like the frozen waves in Japanese prints. A sewing machine under kicked-aside crazy mounds of pots and clothing was an artifact uncovered from a destroyed culture. To Vera’s eyes it had never seemed that the squatter camps she had been in could represent what anyone would be able to regard as home. Now in the destruction of the wretched erections of rubbish-dump materials she saw that these were home, this place had been home.

He talked quietly to people; he and she did not speak to one another, everyone ignored her, as if she could not be seen, the events of the night imprinted on their eyes, blinded to the day.

What happened.

There are always explanations expected.

— I can’t … You can read in the papers what happened, you’ll see on TV what the place looks like now. That’s all. Who has ever explained what a war is like — everyone witnesses something different.—

Ben had a fingernail in his ear, something worrying him in the aperture; the private moment like an offended inattention.

She tried again. — When you’re there yourself, it’s not anything you’ve thought. And everyone who went there would know something else … it wouldn’t be the same for you as for me, or for others as for you.—

— Isn’t it that you didn’t live through the night there. — The tone of one who assumes he knows the other better than she could know herself.

— No no. No no. That’s obvious. It’s not what I’m trying to talk about.—

— After the event: isn’t that what your work is. Always the same thing, not something different: consequences. It’s not the first time you’ve seen such things.—

In her office she dictated to a tape recorder an account of on-site investigation of the Odensville attack. It came back to her desk with neat margins and headings in the flat print-out of a computer. As she read it over for secretarial errors it seemed what Ben had annoyed, almost hurt her, by describing as having been a routine part of case work. The pain of catatonic inertia, yet another aspect of despair in addition to the many she already understood, was a terrible knowledge she would carry, because she never could be, never could wish to be inured to feeling by professionalism. That was what happened at Odensville; that she understood. The other happening was something she came to realize slowly, returned to as a distraction from work and all the preoccupations of her life, interrupting, like a power failure of all the main lines of consciousness and memory, seeking a new connection with responses untapped, as there are known to be connections in the brain that may go unused through a lifetime. At first, with a beat that was half-distaste, half-fear, it came to her suddenly that the gesture of the man, grasping her arm, and her automatic placing of her hand, for a moment, over his knuckles, was a repetition of the compact to begin a love affair with her Hitler Baby, Otto, years ago. Yes — that had been a sexual question-and-answer by sudden contact, but the advance of this other man towards her and his assumption of the right to touch her strangely, her hand placed over his, was something quite other. And yet again quite different from shaking hands, which also has as little to do with any kind of intimacy as greeting by the shoulder-bobbing accolade has to do with kissing.

Any kind of intimacy? She turned away from the problem of interpretation again and again. Certainly not sexual. She knew without doubt from the impulse in the hand that had gone out to cover his that she was not making or responding to a sexual invitation. She knew, even in the tight warm grasp of his big hand, that the gesture from him was not sexual; the nerves of skin and flesh instantly recognize the touch of sensuality. Good god, was she not too old? Wasn’t it even ridiculous, a vanity, that she should imagine this gesture could have been any repetition of the other? She had sometimes feared, in the want, the involuntary yearning of her body for the man Otto, for One-Twenty-One, after he had gone, that when she began to grow old she would become one of those women who have a fancy for young men, that she would dye her hair and undress in the dark to hide drooping buttocks and sad belly from a lover paid with — what? Gold weights and silk shirts are only the beginning. Thank god, no sign of any taste for young men was occurring; but the passing mistrust of self projected upon the commanding outer reality of a community only just breathing under its own rubble, nine dead, a man with a slashed cheek driving while a woman was dying on the back seat — what meaning could the mistrust of self have, what reality, standing against that! To whom could she pose the very inappropriateness of any personal preoccupation arising from a situation where all individuality was in dissolution in terror and despair. Not the lover-husband to whom she used to tell — or thought she had — everything. Only to herself. First the schoolgirl confessional falls away, then the kind of friendships with men and women where, the awareness comes, confidences are regretted as weapons handed to others; finally, the bliss of placing the burden of self on the beloved turns out to be undeliverable. The beloved is unknown at any address, a self, unlike a bed, cannot be shared, and cannot be shed.

In the weeks that followed when Zeph Rapulana was back and forth at the Foundation on the matter of Odensville she slowly came to understand — not so much thinking about it as accepting, unknowingly as a physical change or change of mood come about — that what had disturbed her as a mimesis of the past was the beginning of some new capability in her, something in the chemistry of human contact that she was only now ready for. This country black man about whose life apart from his place in the Odensville case she knew nothing (wife, children, web of relatives and friends) already had this capability. That was why he was able to claim her with what was neither a sexual caress nor an impersonal handshake such as they customarily exchanged. He understood her fear that he was dead was an indication that for reasons not to be explained, nor necessary to try to explain, he was not one more individual at risk in the course of her work. There was between them a level of knowledge of one another, tranquil, not very deep, but quite apart from those relationships complicated and profound, tangled in their beings, from which each came to it, a level that was neither sexually intuitive nor that of friendship.

The circumstances of the lives backed up behind them each had lived so far were an obstacle to the shared references of ordinary friendship. She a middle-class city woman — that was as much decisive as whiteness, ordering the services of her life by telephone or fax, taking for granted a secretary and a bay for her car at the office; his status in his rural community marked — it was not difficult to picture from experience of these places — by neat clothes hanging on a wire and the small pile of books and papers in a shack — what did they share of the familiar, outside the Odensville affair?