Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

— Back at work. And Mpho?—

— The whole thing’s never mentioned at home. She laughs a lot, girl-friends in and out, very busy. It’s what we wanted, I suppose.—

Vera looked round into the pause. — Well, what else?—

— It seems a bit callous, the way she is. But I don’t believe it’s forgotten, inside her. In a way, we gave up her confidence in us. I don’t think Sally realizes we’re not going to get it back.—

As they were leaving the kitchen he blocked the way. — The doctor told me, it was a boy. Apparently you could see already.—

— He shouldn’t have done that!—

— Of course she doesn’t know, neither of them does.—

Vera was careful to enquire again, of Sally. — How are things with Mpho? Were there any problems?—

A momentary coldness, in admonition, flexed the muscles in Sally’s face. — She’s working quite well. She’s been given a leading part in the school play. The school accepted she was away for a week with flu — that time.—

Everything can be patched up. Everything knits somehow, again. Souvenirs are the only evidence: a bullet in a cigarette pack, a half-formed blob of flesh dropped in an incinerator.

I couldn’t live without you.

Her visitors had gone and the threat returned. She lay listening to the inanimate counsel of the house, creaking in its joints with the cooling of afternoon. The hand of a breeze flicked a curtain. The blurt of an old rubber-bulb horn announced six o’clock; as every day at this hour the black entrepreneur on his bicycle was hawking offal from a cardboard box, her gaze on the ceiling saw him as always, lifting portions squirming like bloody spaghetti into the basins of backyard residents who were his clients. Attackers take everything. The sling bag of documents. Address book. Wedding ring. She feels the place where it was, as she investigated the other scars of the attack. The place where the ring was is a wasted circle round the base of the finger, feel it, frail, flesh worn thinner than that of the rest of the digit. Documents, address book — ring; on the contrary, to live: without all these.

Until the man on the road forced her to do so, she had never taken off the ring since Bennet placed it on her finger. She had worn it while making love to Otto. Her finger is naked; free.

They went to Durban for a week. The break fitted in with an opportunity to have a look at a trade fair where Promotional Luggage was displayed.

The ring has never been replaced.

Mrs Stark returned to her office on Monday morning and was told Oupa was back in hospital. It was early, the story vague. Only the receptionist at his desk: Oupa had sat about ‘in a funny way’ last week, he was bent and couldn’t breathe properly. Then he went to the doctor and didn’t return. Someone phoned the doctor and was told he’d been sent to hospital. And then? What did the doctor say was the matter?

No further sense to be got out of a young man who didn’t pay attention to what he heard, was incapable of reporting anything accurately. No wonder messages received at the Foundation were often garbled; irritation with the Foundation’s indulgence of incompetence distracted her attention as she called the doctor’s paging number. She reached him at the hospital. Slow internal bleeding, the lung. Well, it was difficult to say why, it seemed there was an undetected injury sustained when the bullet penetrated, perhaps a cracked rib, and some strenuous effort on the part of the patient had caused a fracture to penetrate the lung. It was being drained. The condition was stable.

At lunchtime Mrs Stark and Lazar Feldman went to visit their colleague. What should they take him? They stopped on the way to buy fruit. At the hospital they were directed to the Intensive Care Unit. Whites habitually misspell African names. Mrs Stark repeated Oupa’s: wasn’t there some mistake? The direction was confirmed. As they walked shining corridors in a procession of stretchers pushed by masked attendants, old men bearing wheeled standards from which hung bags containing urine draining from tubes attached under their gowns, messengers skidding past with beribboned baskets of flowers, unease grew. The community of noise and surrounding activity fell away as they reached the last corridor, only the squelch of Lazar’s rubber soles accompanied a solemnity that imposes itself on even the most sceptical of unbelievers when approaching a shrine where unknown rites are practised. She shook her head and shrugged, to Lazar: what would Oupa, his bullet in a cigarette pack, recovered from what had happened to him and her on the road, be there for as she pictured him, sitting up in bed ready to tell the story to his visitors?

At double doors there was a bell under a no entry sign. They rang and nobody came, so Vera walked in with Lazar lifting his feet carefully and placing them quietly behind her. Cells were open to a wide central area with a counter, telephones, a bank of graphs and charts, a row of white gowns pegged on the wall. A young black nurse in towelling slippers went to call the sister in charge.

Was the place empty?

Is there nobody here?

The wait filled with a silence neither could recognize; the presence of unconscious people.

The sister in charge came out of one of the doorways pulling a mask away from nostrils pink as the scrubbed skin pleated on her knuckles. — Ward Three? We’re pleased with him today, gave us a smile this morning. — The nurse was signalled to take the packet of fruit from Lazar. — Nothing by mouth. — They robed themselves in the gowns.

On a high bed a man lay naked except for a cloth between the thighs, a body black against the sheets. Tubes connected this body to machines and plastic bags, one amber with urine, another dark with blood. The sister checked the flow of a saline drip as if twitching a displaced flower back into place in a vase; the man had his back to them, they moved slowly round to the other side of the bed to find him.

Oupa. A naked man is always another man, known only to a lover or the team under the shower after a match. Friendship, an office coterie, identifies only by heads and hands. The body is for after hours. Even in the intimacy of the injured, on the road, bodies retain their secrecy. Oupa. His fuzzy lashes on closed eyes, the particular settle of his scooped round nostrils against his cheek; his mouth, the dominant feature in a black face, recognized as such in this race as in no other with an aesthetic emphasis created by highly developed function, since we speak and sing through the mouth as well as kiss and ingest by it — his mouth, bold lips parted, fluttering slightly with uneven breaths.

— He’s asleep, we’ll come back later.—

The sister stood displaying him.

— No. Unconscious. It’s the high fever we’re trying to get down. Speak to him, maybe if he knows your voices they’ll rouse him. Sometimes it works. Go on. Speak to him.—

With these gentle calls you bring a child back from a nightmare or wake a lover who has overslept.

Oupa, Oupa, it’s Lazar.

Oupa, it’s Lazar and Vera, here. Oupa, it’s Vera.

She took the hand that was resting near his face. It felt to the touch like a rubber glove filled to bursting point with hot air. His eyelids showed the movement of the orbs beneath the skin. They talked at him chivvyingly, what do you think you’re doing here, who said you could take leave, man, my desk’s a mess, we need you … Oupa, it’s Lazar, it’s Vera … And his head stirred or they imagined it, under the concentration they held on his face.

— There, he hears you. You see? Now nurse’s going to give him a nice cool sponge-down.—

In the reception area Vera waylaid the woman as she strode away. — Why is he in a fever like this — what’s the reason for the high temperature?—