Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

Ben was alarmed to notice that Vera limped slightly going to bed up the narrow staircase with its perfectly restored brass stair-rods. — You were all right at home, what’s gone wrong—

— There aren’t any stairs at home, are there!—

Annie was called to examine her mother’s leg while he stood by ignoring dismissal of his alarm, his frown turned away to ward off the example of the young man who had been with her on the road and died of injuries from which, like her, he was supposed to be recovered. — There’s probably some slight shortening in the tendons, really nothing. It’s inevitable, Daddy, the human body replaces, repairs, and in some instances it can adapt one function to substitute for another, but nothing’s ever quite the way it was.—

— I’m not even aware of it, I told you, Ben. Thank god I’m not a ballet dancer and I’m too old to enter a beautiful-legs contest, eh. I haven’t worn anything but trousers for years— nobody sees those scars.—

In the bedroom, naked, she smiled at him as he lay in the bed. — Nobody but you. — Nakedness in men and women who have lived together a long time is clothed by familiarity, a garment of self. Now she presented her body before him as nude again, consciously so. If that body was damaged by births and time, so that vanity would save her from presenting it before anyone else, for him (there’s the advantage) it took the beautiful form of its known capacities, the flesh remembered everything between them. Vera seduced Ben again, for all that she withheld from him, she flung herself into his embrace, took the force of his entry into her body as a diver plunges to emerge unharmed from under a high surf. They were making love the way a man and woman do, in this house where, on the other side of a wall, two women lay enlaced. The awareness became a kind of excitement, a defiance for her, an assertion for him.

In the early morning they stood against the wooden balustrade of the verandah outside the room. The black velvet curtain of mountain held back the day, breathing smoke from its folds. As the sun splayed over the top it rounded up in light a flock of pines huddled like sheep on its flank. — When did Annie take those torsos from the house?—

— Oh, the last time she came. After the old man died, don’t you remember? She had them packed and sent down by road transport.—

— I know nothing about it.—

— But she must have asked you?—

— She asked you?—

— Of course, and I understood you’d agreed, I thought you’d given them to her.—

— I would never have given those to her.—

— I can’t believe she’d do that.—

— Can hardly ask to have them back now.—

— No don’t. It must have been because she wanted them so badly, she thinks your work was so good.—

Do you lie to him often. Vera knew that Lou had admired them, Lou had thought they were — how did she put it — exceptionally explicit. Lou was the one who had chosen the paintings, collected the old furniture, designed and put into effect the adaptation of an old house to express a chosen way of life without disturbing the shell of its style, formed to contain a way of life the women lovers rejected. The quaint wooden valances on the verandahs and the white-painted wrought-iron fence were in place, but the nursery was some sort of private retreat the two women shared and where others were never invited; the family bedrooms, with the exception of a single guest-room, had been knocked into one grand space, the room where the heart of the house stood, a great low Oriental bed under a canopy mounted on carved posts adapted from Zanzibar lintels.

Ben had created Vera for himself as body, a torso without a head. As such it was (indeed, connoisseur Lou had observed) exceptionally explicit of the power of the body. It had no identity beyond body, and so the body that was Vera, that Ben could not live without, was transformed into the expression of desire between woman and woman. In Annie’s house the headless torsos were become household gods.

Not now, not now. The day would come — no need to be a prophet, a little political nous is all that’s needed — when Didymus would be resuscitated from beyond his lifetime as one of the band of Jacobin heroes who had done terrible things to save liberation in a terrible time. But for the present his greatest service was for him to be forgotten. The chroniclers of history are not those who make it; sufficient honour is being done him in giving him the task of writing the history of struggle in exile. A university press in the United States would publish it and advertise it in literary journals among other books of specialist interest, black studies, women’s studies, homosexual studies, theses on child abuse, drug abuse, holes in the ozone layer. Friends like Vera Stark asked how the book was getting on as if showing attention to a child by enquiring about its progress at school, and when he encountered members of the multi-party Forum on which Sibongile served they absently, looking past his head at someone who interested them more, shouted ‘That’s great, that’s great’ before he could finish answering their enquiry.

He attended sessions of a Patriotic Front Conference as an observer. He certainly could observe Sibongile at her official seat while she could not always have made out where he had found a place for himself. Being there gave him the opportunity to take aside someone with whom he needed to arrange a meeting— hardly call such exchanges between old comrades an interview — to gather or verify information for his writing task. He listened to the speakers with a supplementary decoder of his own running behind the words. He knew where the vocabulary, the turn of phrase of the Communists and nationalist radicals had been revised, by closeness of accession to power, to moderation in provisions of state control, and where the cautious thought of the moderates assumed boldness in sensing that, with power rising under their feet, advocation of half-measures would topple them. Sincere words? If sincerity calls all compromise into question, what (Sibongile had been right) had he been doing, when first he came home and was still on the National Executive, wining and dining, that’s the phrase, with the Boers? What then was the whole philosophy, the business —yes — that’s what it is — of negotiation about?

Sitting there, the observer experienced drastic shifts of response, his body suddenly warmed or drew into itself coldly with the proceedings. After tea break, when men who had blown up power installations joked among themselves, hailing each other as terrorists, and Anglican churchmen ate cake with an imam, the Chair was taken by a man who, during the period when the umfundisi called on a white friend for coffee, had apologized to the Government for sitting down in a train on a seat reserved for white people. From behind his disguises in the person of the umfundisi and others, the observer had followed in the newspapers of the time cartoons depicting the man’s craven apology: Ag sorry my baas Mr Prime Minister Mr President. And followed the scorn of the liberation movements towards this man who had grovelled so that his white masters, poking at him with the toe of a shoe, could let him get up and continue to serve as Government-appointed representative of the people in his particular region of the country. Now he smiled the blind smile of church ministers, before the assembly of men who had survived guerrilla war, men and women who had endured prison and exile, and he spoke of ‘our struggle’. He spoke of ‘the significance of this great assembly’, of ‘my comrades in the struggle of the past, now sharing the heavy responsibility of the future, and bringing to it the same courage and dedication we roused in ourselves when we were fighting the evil of the regime. My Brothers, so we go forward …’