Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

— At present just … I suppose we believe we’re responsible for what we think has gone wrong with our children and in their judgment hasn’t gone wrong at all.—

— Sally and me, with Mpho.—

— Maybe. The villain of that whole business said something to me about Mpho and him. He supposed they couldn’t ‘ever get it right’ (he meant even if he wasn’t married with kids), they’ve both been displaced, their relative ages don’t tally naturally with their actual experiences, there’s a dislocation that couldn’t be corrected. He missed out her teenage stage, in jail; she has a worldly sophistication beyond her years, because of European exile.—

— And our generation created both circumstances … well, it could be. Man, I don’t know. But they wouldn’t apply to Annie?—

— No.—

He saw that this was the limit of her confidences, for the time being; his old Underground experience in being alert to moods when people reveal themselves remained sensitive to the dropping and raising of barriers.

They discussed, as if the itinerary for a journey or the agenda for a meeting, the doctor Vera had managed to persuade — playing on his left-wing sympathies and lack of open activity in liberation politics — to salve his conscience, do his bit by removing an embryo from the daughter of an eminent couple who had suffered for the cause much disruption in their lives. A date and place were set.

Vera walked with Didymus, once again, to his car, this time there openly outside the gate. She hesitated at the window after he was seated. — Ben refuses to believe it — about Annie. He pretends not to know.—

The radio alarm clock Mpho had not been able to resist, duty-free, as she left London airport, woke her with its Japanese version of Greensleeves at the hour she had set. She lay with her fists at her mouth, feeling on them the soft double stream of breath from her nostrils. To awake in the very early morning when everyone else is unconscious is to be alone in the world.

She got up and went to the window, carefully pulled the curtain. All was blurred with mist and, set back on a hill, only the glass façade of a towering building glistened out of it, mirror to the still hidden sun. She took off the Mickey Mouse T-shirt she slept in, her breasts dragged up and bouncing back; threw the shirt on the bed and then picked it up again, rolled it and put it in her duffle bag. Naked, she packed some other clothes and a goggle-eyed toy cat. She went to the window to see one more time the radiant face witnessing her. As she pulled in her stomach muscles to zip up her jeans a sense of fear and wonder and disbelief at what was there, inside, held her dead still. A lump of panic was suppressed with a swallow of saliva. She put herself together as she always was: frilled elasticized band circling her dreadlocks like an open blue rose on the crown of her head, another T-shirt with some other legend or logo on it, bright socks rolled round the ankles, black sneakers, the crook’d wires of one of her collection of earrings hooked through the soft brown tips of her ear-lobes. Mpho. That’s Mpho. The mirror on her dressing-table caught her as the sun did the face of the building; there she is, nothing’s changed. In her trembling sullen unhappiness, something overturned: she felt gaily released for a moment; nothing had ever happened, she had just got off the plane from London to meet the admiring glances of this country called home.

Nobody heard, nobody saw her close the front door behind her. In this white part of the suburban city only joggers were about, hamsters working their daily treadmill. She took an empty bus to a city terminal where blacks arrive from the townships to go to work. Street children lay in doorways as drifts of cartons, paper and banana skins lay in gutters. Women were setting out rows of boiled mealies, the venders of watches, sunglasses, vaseline, baseball caps, baby clothes, were unpacking their stock. A shebeen on a packing-case displayed litre bottles of beer and half-jacks of brandy, and before this altar a man still crazed from the drinking of the night danced round her to mbaqanga music coming from the stall-holder’s cassette player. The freshness of the morning brought the smell of urine as dew intensifies the scent of grass. She passed through it all with an untouchable insolent authority beauty creates, going against the stream of workers, agile among the combis cornering, stopping and starting racing-circuit-style, smiling in response to remarks made to her in the language no one who made them would believe she didn’t understand.

There is dread at the sight of an empty bed.

Gone.

Gone, it says.

Where?

The contractions of fear; people kill themselves if they have been made to feel ashamed of their lives. From that comes the extreme of fear: what should have been done to avert the sight of the bed, there, empty. What has been done to bring it about. Sibongile knows — he doesn’t have to say it, doesn’t have to conceal — Didymus thinks she has been too harsh and judgmental towards the girl.

An appallingly reasonable conviction strikes her; of course. — She’s gone to that man.—

He bunched his mouth. — Unlikely. He’d be scared. I think he’s a weak character. Never mind his record as a comrade. I don’t think he’d take her in, now.—

Sibongile rummaged again for some clue — no note, of course, if the idea is to punish your parents you certainly don’t leave a note. Didymus followed her into the room, a place mute and accusatory. The odour of Mpho was there, the mingle of perfume and deodorants and skin-warmed clothing, sweaty sneakers, the mint-flavoured gum she liked. She could have run away to people they didn’t know she knew, people picked up at those places young people frequent, Kippies, discos. Now something really terrible could be happening to her, rape, drugs.

They stood about in her absence.

— Why do you think she’s done this?—

— Scared. She’s scared of what’s going to happen to her. The operation.—

— For heaven’s sake. It’s hardly an operation. I’ve told her, she’ll be asleep, she won’t feel anything. I even told her I’ve had it, so I know.—

A change in his face. — Why d’you do that.—

But Sibongile — Sally — belonged to the generation and the experience that saw emancipation in burdening their half-adult children with the intimate life of their parents. — Why not? So she wouldn’t be scared.—

— But if you put yourself in the same boat — why should she feel there’s anything wrong with her adventure with the man, why that whole business in the flat, her having to hide her face from us … you get pregnant, you have an abortion, doesn’t matter, it’s nothing to worry about.—

— Oh you make me mad. Isn’t what’s happened enough without you … d’you think she shouldn’t be allowed to know what our life was like sometimes in exile, how hard up we were, couldn’t even keep the boys with us, how could we have another child those days in East Germany! You always want to protect her from everything, and then look what she brings on herself … As if what I had to go through has anything to do with her playing around with someone else’s man and getting herself pregnant!—

He spread and then dropped his hands: not prepared to argue. — I’m going to his flat to see if he knows where she is.—

Sibongile was due to take part in a press conference — it would be that very morning the child chose to run away, God knows where. She was dressed for public exposure. In her distraction and anxiety she had put on as a general does his uniform her tailored skirt and jacket, her accoutrements of small gold ear-rings (nothing showy), her carved wooden bracelets — as royalty is expected to wear garments and jewellery designed and made in their own country, a walking billboard for home products, she always saw to it that she included on her person some example of African craft. It’s understood — and she exacted this from her co-workers — that personal obligations must be subordinate to the cause, always had been in exile and clandestinity and were no less now, round conference and negotiation tables. Public exposure may be an armour within which trembling flesh is hidden. Photo opportunities (that’s what the press asks for) are the victim’s obligation to wear a persona separated by duty from self.