Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

What is a party? For Vera tonight it is a mass of distraction hiding everyone from themselves, a dose of drink and noise that blocks what you don’t want to think about.

We can’t talk now.

That night there was another party. When Ben in pyjama shorts (still had the figure for them) went down through the garden to fetch the Sunday paper from its slot in the gate there was the headline. A wine-tasting in a golf clubhouse had been attacked with hand grenades and automatic rifle fire. Four revellers were killed, others injured. He went slowly back to the house, reading the story, aware in peripheral vision of avoiding a couple of plates and a beer glass with its dregs filled with drowned insects, left on the grass by his guests. He sat on the bed, where Vera still lay, staring unseeing at his fine dark-haired legs as he listened to the radio report of reactions to the attack. Horrible, horrible, said a black bishop; cowardly murder of innocent people, commented a Government spokesman; savagery due to the Government losing control of blacks, according to the white right-wing. And the whole outcry merely because the victims were white, stated the Movement’s rival organization, neither confirming nor denying responsibility for the attack.

— Dorp connoisseurs. — Ben ran fingers up and down through hair on his thigh.

— And they don’t know how it came to happen, do they. Wine-tasting and a terrorist attack! Ben — it’s as if something contrived exactly what would show how out of the incongruity in our lives comes the horror? That’s just it! Innocence , they say. I don’t know what that means, any more, if it means we don’t know what’s happening outside a golf course. If people can sit sipping and spitting some Cape vintage ‘innocent’ of the existence for others of guns and bombs. How far away from one another they were, for the clash of incongruity to be so awful.—

— Further than we were.—

If it was a question she didn’t seem to hear. Across mown greens and raked bunkers, across veld farmland, the man’s reassuring broad back is leading them, the farmhouse door slams shut. — If you were to put that clubhouse in some film, some agitprop film, everyone would say it was too contrived, too obvious, too symbolic. Wine and blood. But with us, it happens.—

Sometimes picking up a garment as if not recognizing it, they dressed. The radio recounted the attack. — Thank god that crowd has taken responsibility — if you don’t deny you’re con firming, aih? That won’t give anybody the chance to dump blame on the Movement. — Ben worked his feet into worn moccasins. — Not a noble satisfaction, I know.—

— How would the Movement be thought to go in for that kind of tactic? With what purpose? It’s not exactly an act to reassure whites and win their votes when the time comes. — Vera was making the bed.

— Exactly. That’s why it would be useful to the government, if suspicion could be planted. But once responsibility’s boasted elsewhere — with a nice racist ring to it — you heard what the APLA 4man said: there’s outrage only because the victims are white.—

— But that’s true, you know it, Ben. Last week a whole family was gunned down in their sleep. But in a black township not a golf club. Four or five lines on an inside page. Even I only now remember reading it … And no statement from the ones who’re outraged now.—

— You know what my partner would say if you told him that? ‘What if you’d been in that clubhouse? Your wife?’—

— So we keep the pretence that’s forced upon us by this killing among so many. That everyone deplores, condemns unequivocally etc.—

— Yes, yes! You can’t support any part of the views of that man, can you—

At breakfast the young women appeared languidly tousled, their yawns rapidly silenced by the news. — Imagine, could you possibly imagine how terrified they must have been, for a moment thinking someone was playing a sick joke, and then the person beside you blown to bits … better to be killed at once than to know you might be next. — Annie drew in her lips and hunched her arms. — Think of us all last night. — The two women held hands resting on the table, Annie’s the spatulate-fingered, much-scrubbed hands of a doctor, the friend’s large and dirtied with nicotine on skin and nails. In a skimpy T-shirt and shorts Lou was seen to be very thin and muscular, the nipples of breasts like a preadolescent’s nobby beneath the clinging shirt, a concave chest between round posts of shoulders. The linked hands were laid out before Ben and Vera; their eyes drawn to them as the talk went back and forth.

Annie was persistent. — D’you think it could have been us?—

— The bishop said it could have happened in the middle of his service. — Vera directed herself to the girl Lou; it was as if she had something to ask her other than what was being said. — I don’t suppose the fact that we were blacks and whites would make much difference if the object is to create terror. Stop negotiations. But think of the international hullabaloo if the UN representative were to have been killed. Now that would have been something to wake up the outside world to this Government’s failure to deal with violence.—

Lou gave an aghast laugh. Annie assumed responsibility, perhaps admiringly, for her mother. — You do take things coolly! — She cocked her head to touch Lou’s, it was the foal’s butting gesture with which as a child she would claim affection and comfort from Ben or Vera. — Well … will you excuse us? That rather nice Lazar’s asked us to come for a walk on a farm, he’s due to pick us up.—

Ben was wheeling through stations on the radio for one that might be giving further details of the attack. — Where’d they say they’re off to?—

— Lazar’s invited them somewhere.—

— Lazar? Oh.—

We can’t talk now.

He’s sitting in her office against the light; the still solidity of him. She gets up from her desk to lower a blind and his features emerge, watching, listening. What is it about that face? The eyes — the eyes in repose always have that line of fellow-feeling, a slight lifting crease of the lower lid; that’s the only way she can define it to herself. Where does it come from, that expression that is not a smile, that self-assurance that is not concealed arrogance? There is nothing in her experience of other people to explain this man. Whatever she tries does not fit. Yet she does not need to enter his life with personal enquiries that would become a burden to both, each having to take into account circumstances with which, unlike the Odensville affair, she has nothing to do.

— You once said something. ‘We won’t harm you or your wife, your family.’—

— Yes. Yes.—

— And then he came with his commando and people in the squatter camp were killed.—

— Yes. He did.—

— Now what about this attack, the night we were all together at my house. When we talked on the phone you said you were shocked, it was a cruel and terrible thing — you said. Just as everybody else, we all did. I know you mean what you say. I said the same. But I don’t trust myself.—

Patient for understanding, he never was waiting to jump in with his own opinions.

— What reason have you not to trust yourself, Vera.—

— The same reason I have not to trust any of us.—

They smiled.

— We all pass deftly from hand to hand the assumption that it’s human life that’s sacred, it’s an unblinking pact, we look each other in the eye and say, it’s the killing of human beings we deplore, we don’t have any other considerations, no matter who does it or why.—

— Isn’t that so?—

— Isn’t it the conventional wisdom of whites? And what’s that to us? Blacks don’t believe it. When I heard that APIA man on the radio saying there’s outrage only because this time whites were killed, I agreed with him. He shocked people because they see him as racist, but what he said is more than fact, Zeph, it’s true, it’s right inside, deep in whites who own newspapers and the TV and radio stations. But we can’t say it because we’re not racist, we can’t say it because we have to demonstrate we don’t stereotype, we don’t use racial categories in the worth of human life. Killings are killings. Death is death. Blood and wine mix. All we can produce is this cover-up.—