Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

If there had been somewhere for her to wait for him while he made his visit she would have suggested that he leave her there so that she would not intrude. She hung back as two small children threw aside the cardboard box in which one sat while the other pulled it through the dust, and leapt to fling themselves at him. The younger had him by the leg, the elder hung from his neck. Hampered with joy, he staggered through the gap of a fence that had been shored up with strands of barbed wire and off-cuts of tin roofing, and approached the small, sagging mud-brick house, as much part of the features of the country as anthills in the veld. One of the children broke loose and ran inside shouting. There was some exchange; a woman came out, a plump young face screwed up, hand shielding her gaze. She greeted — her man? her husband? — respectfully, distantly, in the manner of one expecting an explanation. In their language, he introduced Vera. Shaking hands, brought close to her: the tender roundness of the neck with the gleam of sweat-necklaces in its three circling lines.

These shelters provided for by men absent in cities fill up with women; in the all-purpose room were several and a baby or two, flies, heat coming from a polished coal stove. The sweetish smell of something boiling — offal? — was swallowed with tea flurriedly made for the white visitor; the children brought her their school exercise books. Perhaps they thought she was some kind of teacher or inspector. In her familiarity, through her work, with homes like this one, scatterings of habitation outcropped along with the trash-pits of white towns, she was accustomed to being regarded as someone to whom it was an opportunity to address a demand, attention. She and the children chattered and laughed although they had no common language, while she admired their drawings and painstaking calligraphy. Time passed — some idea the visitors were to wait for the eldest child to come home from school. But he did not appear, and his father was not surprised or perturbed. — It’s far. And they play on the road, you know how kids are. Sometimes I myself, I used to be the whole afternoon, coming home, forgetting to come … — From the cajoling, laughing tone of his voice he was telling the mother not to be angry with the child, but she jerked her head in rejection. Such movements of self-assertion surfaced from the withdrawn placidity with which she kept her place. Sitting at the kitchen table, she might be any of the other women murmuring there. Her man from the city talked and she responded only to questions, now and then giggled when others did, and covered her mouth with her hand. The sun shifted its angle through the window barred with strips of tin; he decided, turning to his fellow visitor — Time to get going, hei— And while the farewells were being made to all the women, the children hung again about him. Their heads caressed under his hands storing up the shapes, he asked — undercover — whether his employer could help him out? — The loan of twenty rands or so.—

Only then did he and his wife have a few minutes alone together; he put his palm on her waist to guide her to the only other room of the house, where through the door, in a mirror, a crocheted bedspread was reflected. The door was not closed behind them but their voices were so low they could not be heard in the kitchen. Whether they embraced, whether they said to one another what could not be said in the company in which the visit had passed, no one could know. They were soon back. He hugged his children, he joked again with the women: a man, a lover, a husband, a father. His wife stood aside — displaced by an arrival without a letter, without warning in the life she held together by herself; in her stance, the way her full neck rose, she alone, of all the other women, in possession of him; lonely. That was how Vera saw her and did not know she would never forget her.

Driving away. To say he was so happy: how to explain what this was. He might have expected to be sad. Depressed, at least, at taking up with the road the split in his life. But he was talking about his children, boastful of their excitement at seeing him, he was drinking deep of being loved. — Man, I wish you could’ve seen my big boy, last time, he was nearly as tall as I am — right up here to my ear. And he’s clever, there he’s already bigger than me, I’m telling you … He can do everything. At Christmas, one of my other uncles was here at their place with his car, so this kid says, Ntatemoholo , I bet you I can drive, so his uncle gets in next to him and hands over the keys. And off! That kid manages the clutch, gears, everything. Just learnt from watching people.—

To say he was happy: it’s to say he was whole. He’d accepted himself again; husband, father, Freedom Fighter, womanizer, and clerk at the Legal Foundation. At that moment when, glancing at his profile, she found the definition, he saw someone flagging him down on the road. A black man was waving a plastic container. A good mood overflows in openness to others; the Foundation station-wagon slowed and pulled up level with a brother in trouble, run out of gas. He leaned from the window and spoke to the man in the language of the district. An arm thrust through and snatched the keys from the ignition. She heard the gurgle as the forearm struck against Oupa’s windpipe in passing and saw the mound of a ring with a red stone on a finger. Tswaya! Get out! A voice that of a man giving routine orders.

All the muscles in Oupa’s body gathered in a storm of tension that sucked into a vacuum his shock and hers, she felt it draw at her as if he had had his hand upon her. He burst out of the door knocking the man back with its force. The scuffle and animal grunting and yells of two men fighting. She saw another man run from behind the decoy car with a gun and she jumped out of the passenger seat hearing a woman’s voice screaming screaming and ran screaming, another self, screaming, to where the two men fought on the ground. The keys were thrown, the hand that had held them struggling to get something out of his pocket as he fought. She and the third man were racing towards the ring of keys shining in the dust; she was terrified of what she was converging with, thumping tread like hooves making for her, there was a loud snap of giant fingers in the air—! and then another that gave her a mighty punch in the calf. She lost herself, more from lack of breath than whatever had happened to her leg. The first thing she was restored to was the ordinary sight of a man picking up a ring of keys. He came over and not looking at her face, tore off her watch and grabbing her left hand, pulled at the ring on her finger. She put her finger in her mouth, wet it with saliva and gave the hand to him. He made a disgusted face and signalled her to take off the ring. She worked it over the knuckle and handed it to him; she didn’t know what had happened to her leg, she didn’t know if she could get up, he was there above her ready to strike her down if she did. The sling bag — her money, the Foundation’s money, all her documentation — was in the station-wagon, was his, taken possession of without any further effort necessary. As feeling came to her leg in the form of pain making pathways for itself, she saw as he left her that he was not like the other, he was a puny man and the thumping tread that had pursued her had come only from the pump-action of jogging shoes below skinny legs.

The two vehicles were driven away. He — Oupa — lay gasping over there. There was a tear in her jeans, quite small, some ooze of blood, she did not want to roll the pants leg and see more, she had the desire to sit up and wrap her arms tightly round the leg but she moved, squatting on one leg and supporting the other, to where he was. They clasped hands, dumb. Tears of effort, of the violence with which he had fought, were finger-painting the dirt on his face. He patted his ribs on the right side to show her where: blood was blotting out the face of Bob Marley printed on his T-shirt. They were castaways in the immensity of the sky. They were abandoned in the diminishing perspective of an empty dirt road, leaving them behind as a speck to be come upon as hornbills come upon a cowpat. They helped each other somehow to the side of the road.