Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

A lawyer and a clerical assistant, both of the Legal Foundation, were attacked this week while on an investigative tour of State-owned land the Government proposes to sell off to private ownership in advance of the installation of an interim government. The Foundation has criticized the Government’s intention to ‘offer this land to speculators and developers when a future government expects to use it to solve the enormous land and housing crisis existing in the country’.

What play of inference and preconception, this way or that, comes between the news item on an inside page and what has happened as an interruption of or, maybe, the culmination of certain directions. In the context of newspaper headlines, the nightly sheet-lightning of violence, psychedelic entertainment darkening and flaring on the television screen, this must be an attack by black hatred on a white foolish enough to think she had any reason to be in areas whites themselves had declared fit only for blacks; or it could be an attack by white hatred of white collaborators with blacks’ intention to seize land — the land! — for themselves. Either way, serve the victims right.

And the third possibility. Created as climate creates conditions, accepted like the lack of rain — the couple could have been robbed because they didn’t lock the doors, they didn’t keep the gun handy, they should have had the sense to stay at home. Stay out of it.

Mrs Vera Stark sustained a bullet wound in the leg and Mr Oupa Sejake was wounded in the chest.

What were they doing on a road far from the site of any State land on their itinerary? To know that would be to have to enter their lives, both where they touched and widely diverged, to be aware of what they knew about each other and what they did not know; where they had expectations, obligations operating covertly one upon the other. To know at least that much.

Vera could not know whether, by acting as procuress of an abortion for Oupa’s girl, she was someone to whom he felt he owed gratitude or resentment. The old woman said — Didymus had told her — We are not white people. Didymus dismissed this smiling, in passing. But maybe Oupa would have liked to have a child, somewhere, souvenir of the beautiful girl who was not for him, out of his class, speaking and moving in the manner of cities he had never seen, yet at the same time a black girl, sharing the precious familiarity, the dangerous condition of being black, for which he had dredged seaweed and broken rocks on a prison island. Oupa didn’t have his wife and children with him in One-Twenty-One; what difference if there were to have been another child, likeness of hours of love-making and virility, to be visited with gifts at the home of some grandmother?

He didn’t bring his plastic container of pap and curried chicken-leg to keep company in Mrs Stark’s office. He didn’t discuss problems of his legal studies with her. He was in and out with papers and messages and talk on Foundation matters continued between them as usual, but there were no lively asides from him, he kept his eyes on papers or unfocussed, to concentrate on what was being discussed; only occasionally, from the door, as if he had forgotten something, in what was barely a pause: his smile.

This — to her — self-punishing attitude became more and more unnecessary; she found herself increasingly impatient with the idea that he should have to feel exaggeratedly contrite, to the extent that this was carried over to his demeanour at work. If he thought it was expected of him by her , she didn’t know how to convey to him that this certainly was not so. The image of Mpho, brought to mind by his behaviour, changed outline, developed, on reflection. That charmer was fully aware of, became completely in control of her attraction; quite as much capable of seduction as a man; this young man. There was never any suggestion that she’d been raped, or even found herself innocently in a situation where submission to unwelcome desire was difficult to repulse. Sly little miss lied to her parents, made friends collude with and cover up for her when she went to make love in that flat; the love-nest of two generations.

On the three-day drive around the country the atmosphere between Mrs Stark and Oupa was easier but still was created only by exchanges of reaction to what they saw and to whom they talked in relation to their task. They spent a night in a Holiday Inn where Oupa swam in the pool and she, drinking a beer on the terrace, saw no objection, from the party of white farmers at the next table, to his presence among their splashing, shrieking children. Even at the dorp hotel they slept in the second night, a place where the proprietor and his wife slumped before the television set in the bar lounge while a receptionist-cum-barman took the guests’ particulars, their arrival was accepted with listless resignation. The dorp was dying; local farmers who used to fill the bar had abandoned their farms and moved to town during the years when they feared for their security from groups of black guerrillas infiltrating from over the border; those farmers who had formed commandos and stayed, then, were now trying to sell their farms before blacks reclaimed land under a majority government. But in the meantime without the patronage of black drinkers in the public bar the hotel would be abandoned, too. From his armchair the proprietor called out in Afrikaans — Show mevrou and meneer to their rooms, Klaus, show where the bathroom is.—

They laughed together over this as they had not laughed since Oupa summoned her to the flat. The factotum dragged back and forth serving a dinner of mutton, mealie rice and pumpkin they ate with satisfaction, as people retain a taste for the dishes of their country others would find dull and unappetizing. In his high-collared white jacket moulded in sweat-dried contours like a plaster cast containing his body, listing on shoes cut out on the uppers to ease bunions, the old black man brought Oupa’s third can of beer.

— Didn’t your baas see me when he told you to show the meneer his room, Baba?—

In the black face darker-streaked with age the mouth gaped on a thick pink tongue. He looked slyly, comically round the empty dining-room before answering in his language. Oupa, clasping the old man’s arm, laughed as he translated for her: The white man doesn’t want to see nothing. Nothing any more. Nothing nothing.

In the quiet of an early-morning start in another part of the country, an empty road, hornbills taking off from cowpats they were pecking at as the Foundation station-wagon approached, Oupa spoke as if to himself — This’s only about fifty kilometres from my uncle’s place. Where my wife stays with the kids. The turn’s just over there at the trees.—

She was watching the approach of the stand of eucalyptus; they neared; she could see long swathes of swaddling bark peeling from their white trunks.

— Let’s take it.—

He turned his head to her. — We go there?—

— Yes. — Mrs Stark authorizing transgression of one of the strictly honoured rules of the Foundation: the Foundation’s vehicles are not to be used for private purposes. And Vera added — Why not. It makes no sense for you to be so close, and drive on.—

So that day when they should have been heading for the city and the office she offered him a joy-ride; not in the usual sense, of aimless pleasure, but the joy of restoration, union, in some — tentative — compensation for the sundering that outcast him, in his sense of self, in what she knew of him in the city.

He asked no questions. That he didn’t was in itself a dissolve of constraint and a return to the old simple confidence between them. He opened his window to let the morning air gush in wide, he slotted a Ladysmith Black Mambazo cassette into the player, he drove faster; it was as if he had downed a couple of the beers he enjoyed so much. — You give me the green light, okay. I’m going to stop at a store. Get some sweets and things. — As they neared the settlement there were roadside venders selling mounds of sweet potatoes and onions and an Indian store into whose dimness he disappeared in skipping strides. He came out with chips and Jelly Babies, clear plastic guns filled with candy pills for the children, and packets of tea and sugar, the gifts poor people offer adults the way rich visitors offer flowers.