Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

Vera became conscious of the hand on her shoulder as if it had just descended there. — I don’t think so.—

— He’s the kind of man who’d be right. Appeal to her, surely. He isn’t living with some woman, is he? You usually know what’s happening outside the Foundation.—

— No one permanent, far as I know. Girl-friends, passing affairs.—

— I’ve got a hunch they’d get on. She hasn’t some big affair going all this time in Cape Town, has she? What about that doctor she once introduced us to, Van der Linde? Would she have told you? This schoolgirl-sharing-a-house, going about girls-together — it’s all right for teenagers but she’s over thirty. I can’t believe it isn’t a smoke screen for something — some love affair with someone who’s married, probably.—

— She’s living with this girl. She seems happy.—

— That’s why I think there’s some complication with a man.—

They walked on. There was a stutter of music from the house, a cassette starting and stopped. Vera halted, and he turned, thinking they were about to return to the house.

— Ben, they sleep together. In one bed. The other girl doesn’t use the divan. Annie said when I took her to the room the day they arrived, they always sleep together.—

— My god, what an idea. Childish. She’s a doctor and thirty-something years old. Why not a teddy-bear, as well.—

They were approaching the steps, the young people there, the house full of others drinking and eating.

— Would you ever share a bed with another woman.—

— No. But you know that. We can’t talk now.—

The party goes on. In the kitchen plates pile on left-over food, Vera washes glasses because Ben’s supply has run out. One or the other, they join this group and that. In a corner of the living-room the stab of interrupting voices vies with the music. A heavy young Englishman in a catfish-patterned dashiki is using the height from which he projects his voice to dominate a discussion on conditions in the liberation movement’s prison camps, which have been the subject of a newspaper exposé. —You can’t make such sweeping generalizations. Things differed from camp to camp. I myself can say—

A head was dipped disparagingly. — As a journalist, from outside.—

— Yes, a journalist, poking my nose where it wasn’t welcome. But I wasn’t doing so in the capacity of my work. My brother-in-law happens to have been held in two of those camps so I have the picture from outside and inside.—

— Your brother-in-law?—

— Yes, my brother-in-law, my wife’s brother Jerry Gwangwa.—

A small black woman wearing the Western antithesis of her white husband’s outfit, satin trousers and a string of pearls in the neck of her tailored shirt, stood by looking up now and then to others in the manner of one watching the impression he was making. — But at first they wouldn’t tell you anything, you had to—

— Why do you talk of things you know nothing about—

His soft thick throat throbbed like a frog’s. He did not look at his wife as he spoke. — My own brother-in-law was beaten on the soles of the feet, he was strung up, in another camp these methods were not used, it was no five-star hotel but … all depends on who was in command. I had some contact with him … what I know is not secondhand. Jerry’s not bitter although how he happened to be subject to all this — that’s another story, he should never have been there, while there were plenty who certainly deserved to be.—

Didymus was in the group, a good listener who, Vera saw, contributed nothing. He turned away with her as she moved on, and Tola Richards, the journalist’s wife, joined them.

— I didn’t know about your brother.—

She stood, stranded, before Didymus; before Vera. She gestured with her glass as if about to tip its contents in someone’s face. — Oh haven’t you heard it from Alec before? It’s his party piece. Whenever there’s someone who doesn’t know us, he produces his punchline about the brother-in-law so they can be impressed he’s married a black. Don’t you know I’m his passport? I’m his credentials as a white foreigner. Because he can produce me, it means he’s on the right side. That gets him in everywhere.—

Best thing was to assume she’d had too much to drink; Didymus put his arm round her in a hug and said something to her in their own language. The three of them laughed it off. We can’t talk now. Someone was waving and beckoning to the young woman and she broke away. Didymus and Vera had nothing to say to one another but were comfortable together at a distance each understood the other could not cross. It was, at least, their distance; like a place they had once been to, together. He had lied by means of an ambiguous sentence. What he had hidden by it was: I didn’t know Jerry Gwangwa was your brother. But I do know he was a plant, a South African police agent, nineteen years old, he was sent with a false record of being detained and escaping to make his way to Tanzania to present himself for military training with Umkhonto. He was to encourage dissatisfaction among the trainees, homesickness and drug-taking, and to inform other agents of the movements of military commanders, so that assassinations could be carried out. He was bloodied before he left home; he had killed two youth leaders in their beds and planted a car bomb that killed three others and took the legs of a fourth. He was interrogated by Maxi, code name for Didymus Maqoma. He survived, confessed, and having convinced the Americans he was a Freedom Fighter, was studying for a Ph.D. on a scholarship at one of their universities. Vera could not know what Didy’s preoccupation was, in the eye of silence he and she occupied briefly in the late-night animation around them, but she acknowledged it instinctively. In a long life there are many different pockets of collusion that form with different people out of different circumstances and, although generally forgotten, occasionally jingle there a kind of coinage, a handful of tokens good for re-entry to a shared mood.

Ben was approaching with an arm round either girl, his daughter and her friend, forced by him into a dancing trot. — I’m telling these two, either we get everyone going with some hot music or it’s time to send them all home. — But he looked deeply tired, the skin around his eyes so dark it seemed each had been struck by a fist, the lines from nose to mouth chiselled heavily, thickening what had been his beautiful lips into drooping coarseness. Once again at a party — as she had seen him as if with the gaze of another, at a party when first he had become lover turned husband — she saw him without the lens of her image of him. Annie, smiling under his arm, was the bearer of that face, now; on him, it was no longer there. Weariness revealed him in spite of or because of the youthful energy he was summoning. — Come, let’s show them. — In the mountains, with muscles lightly trembling from the day’s climb, the love-making, fresh from the shower, they stood together at the invitation of music. There was the same readying slight movement of his shoulders before he took Vera to dance. The others laughed and applauded his expertise, egging him on. The warmth of his body, private in his clothes, was the warmth of the bed they shared. People were looking around for the hosts to say goodbye; she broke away to go to them, trailing his hand for the first few steps. Behind the straggle of Oupa, the Maqomas, Lazar, the Richards and the United Nations envoy, Zeph Rapulana was leaving. She had not had a chance to talk to him the whole night. Sally was embracing her with her usual formula, enthusing — You know just how to do things, what a good time, we must get together— and she saw Zeph Rapulana over Sally’s shoulder. His was a calm she could not reach. He was shaking hands with everyone in his countryman’s courtesy.