Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

Didymus gazed from the man to those grouped around him. Men with whom Didymus had been in detention, known the clandestine contacts of living as moles; with whom he had barely escaped being blown up in Safe Houses; at his wife, with whom he had moved from exile to exile on different continents. A disbelief twitched dully in his hands and legs. Distress; he looked about him for someone to blurt out at: the shit, that shit. What was that man doing up there among people he had shamed by grovelling before the white man?

Didymus knew: what he could not accept. A constituency. That’s what the man was. A community of people we can’t do without, in this conglomerate we call unity. But every time he looked at him disgust rose and had to be suppressed.

If I could clear my head as you clear your throat.

Others were speaking and he had not heard.

His attention drifted back to them. A white man held the microphone curiously, as if this were a gesture of allegiance, a raised fist or the hand that rests on a bible to testify. Didymus knew him, of course, although he was a strangely fat and hairless version of himself, now. The result of some drug. He had been ill — some said an incurable illness — and often absent from his place on the National Executive.

He was saying — what? He was answering the unheard Didymus. — We’ve made many compromises with the past. We’ve swallowed the stone of many indignities. We have formed relationships we never would have thought possible or necessary. (There was a fidget of alarm along the row of delegates.) But if we really want to serve our people, if we want to convince them, in every hut and shack and hostel, if we want to convince them that when they make their cross on a bit of paper in our first one-man-one-vote elections they really may have the chance to be led by and represented by honesty, by men and women who are not seeking power to sleep in silken sheets, to grant themselves huge salaries, to take and give bribes, to embezzle and to cover up for others who steal, to disperse secret funds of public money buying contracts that are never to be fulfilled — if we’re going to ask our people to put trust in a new constitution we have first to put our lives on the table to vow integrity, we have to swear publicly, here and now, and entrench this in a constitution, that we will not take up with power what the previous regime has taken.—

Of course Didymus knew him well. He was a man in whom there were depths Didymus knew in himself, dangerous depths it was difficult to believe, knowing their history, a white man in this country could occupy. And yet there had been some, and what they had gained, for whites, was something most white people would never acknowledge because they would never understand. It was through such people that whites had gained acceptance for the future in spite of their past; it was through such a man that colour and race could count for nothing and the delegates in their seats were of different skins, instead of all black. Would the whites ever realize that? Such a man sets a precedent others like Didymus’s good friends the Starks find spirit enough to follow, whether they’re conscious of this lead or not. Such a man wakes what has been buried by fear and the deliberate function of custom, called, as if humans were dogs at obedience class, conditioning.

— … we are not going to pay for private planes to take our ministers on holiday overseas. We are not going to foot hotel bills for their families, their lovers and mistresses. We are not going to give our members of parliament allowances to run Mercedes-Benzes. We are not going to disguise, cover up, label ‘top secret’ spending of public money the public won’t know about. They had their Broeders, let us not use our Brothers the same way. Let us tell our people, and mean it — we shall not lie, and cheat, and steal from them. Without this, I tell you, all the provisions of a constitution we are debating so carefully are meaningless!—

He ended with a sudden simple gesture, as if remembering himself, passing his free hand over the dome of his skull, where the pale spores of chemically blasted hair were a fuzz of light.

Such a man has been dangerous because in the depths of self — his and what Didymus knows as his own — is the idea of necessary danger. And this implies wiliness; the man has lied, prevaricated, denied the facts when there was something to be gained in struggle: but never for personal profit, never that!

This morality will remain a mystery for ever. It is the morality, beyond the old justification of ends and means, he and Didymus knew rather in the sense the bible uses of ‘knowing’ a woman: they knew it from entering it completely. But what the man was saying now seemed to have nothing to do with all that. What he was saying now was — terminal, yes. He spoke from beyond his politics; but it was not his terminal illness that spoke, it was the final conclusion beyond politics. It came up from a depth dredged by a whole life, beyond the one he and Didymus both knew. Pragmatic, clever, he would never have spoken like this before. This was not his rhetoric, it was his message.

Whether the assembly of his peers, whether the observers round Didymus knew that — there was applause because his status as one of the heroes always drew applause, and the new heroism, of his resistance to illness, merited it anew. But no one picked up the microphone — the public amplification of his voice from the Mount by which he had sworn testimony — to take up what he had said. The assembly passed on to other matters.

Didymus wanted to go up after the session and say to his old comrade-in-arms — what? But the man was apart from the general throng, apparently drafting something in a corner with two others. An approach looked like curiosity. Or envy. Once there has been rejection, nothing is certain, even between old intimates.

The giant sky cracked its knuckles far off in an approaching assault. Under the bedroom lamp Sibongile was sewing back the loose metal catch on the neckband of his black tie. Her eyebrows were lifted stoically at the last-minute task; he was to accompany her to a reception given at the close of the Patriotic Front Conference by one of the new embassies opened in Pretoria. He looked at his feet, shiny in black shoes acquired along with homecoming. — What a loud silence when Dave spoke this morning. What did it mean?—

Sibongile had a way of breaking off whatever she happened to be doing and staring into a statement she found suspect.

— What should it mean?—

— I expect someone to stand up and support a speech like that, I’d expect enthusiasm for it, coming from everyone there.—

She went on sewing. — There was plenty of applause.—

— For him. It’s always done — applaud Chris, applaud Joe, applaud Dave. They’re hailed for what they are —whatever they might say.—

— Of course the applause was support for what he said! You’re getting morbid.—

— But not a word of comment, not a word, not a single reference, as if he’d never spoken at all. As if no one wanted to hear.—

— Because everyone’s committed against corruption, no need to jump up and shout ‘I agree’, everyone believes it, everyone takes it for granted. Except you.—

— Except Dave. He thought you ought to hear.—

At the open window the sky thickened as if with inky murk expelled by an octopus. The drawn breath of the coming storm stilled birds, crickets, everything; the breath was cold against summer’s surfaces — leaf, cloth, metal, skin. It seemed, in the small room, to be created by Sibongile, it was her chill of annoyance, the presage of the storm came to him as the realization that she took ‘you’ to be directed at her instead of, as he had spoken it, the entire assembly. In place of hastening to reassure her he was overcome — with the sweep of a sudden gust that ran before the storm, slamming the window — by resentment. A lit fuse-wire of lightning racing across the sky struck and the house lights failed, providing a domestic diversion; Mpho stumbled in from her room with a shriek. She giggled and nuzzled her father. They hugged. He reassured her teasingly in Xhosa; Mpho had learnt something of an African language by now but she would never get accustomed to African storms like an African-born girl.