Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

On the slow drive tunnelled through rain where their headlights poked a direction, tapes of old Dizzy Gillespie recordings, the kind of music that had accompanied their life together wherever they were, repaired fragility between husband and wife; an old remedy — if only this had been a lovers’ quarrel. Sibongile allowed herself a gesture from some television serial repertoire, straightening his black bow-tie with an appreciative expression as they entered the residence of the ambassador recently arrived from the Far East. How confidently and attractively Sibongile, in African robes and turban she wore for such occasions, picked up whatever conventions of ceremony and protocol came from different cultures! The kind of contacts they had had in exile around the world as obligation and privilege of various positions he held there might have been more important but were less social; a liberation movement in exile may be received secretly by foreign ministers, commissars, army and Secret Service generals whose self-interest (shared ideology, future access to raw materials, trade privileges, military co-operation, expansion of spheres of influence) in the defeat of a particular regime offers support to the liberation movement, but neither supplicant nor donor, for reasons of security or their other alliances, had ever wanted these deals displayed in the disguise of full dinner dress Didymus wore now.

Sibongile was the one more suited to present roles. Moving from group to group about the room, she paused with equal amiability among members of the white Government, comrades from the Movement, and a loud huddle that included the sometime apologist for having sat in a white’s seat in a train. Now Didymus heard her familiar singing rise of voice as she joked with the man, drawing attention to his resemblance to the huge ink-and-wash panel of a Chinese sage on the wall behind him, his wispy beard and straggle of hair over his collar therefore referred to without offence, flatteringly. Delighted, taking the reference as to his wisdom, he was making some remark Didymus could not catch, and put his arm in avuncular flirtatiousness round her bare shoulders, half-complimenting, half-patronizing femininity.

While Didymus stood talking to others, in his mind he walked across the room and pulled her away, punched the face with the smile that had forfeited self-respect in apology for what should have been taken as right, and slapped the woman who tolerated his touch. Slapped Sibongile. As if Sibongile were a woman craven as the man, and would accept restriction on her actions; as if he, Didymus, belonged to the tradition of men who took it as their right to hit their women. Sibongile had been, was his comrade-in-arms, something along with and beyond his woman. The fantasy enacting within him had no sense or usefulness in real time. Sibongile was on a mission, in action suited to particular circumstances, as often he had been. He said nothing to her of the incident. He was tender to her when they got home that night. Sibongile had the feeling he thought he had to atone to her for something — something that had been said to her or about her? That she had been wounded — had a wound of public life (by now she knew well enough about those) she herself was not yet aware of, but that would evidence itself, throb in harm, in time, sometime? — What did you think of it?—

— Of what?—

— Well, the ambassador, the evening, the whole do—

He answered in her language, that they used in intimacy. — Just like all the others now. Exchange compliments with foreigners for trade deals, alliances, maybe arms if we should need such things again. Eat and drink with friends and enemies even if once they drank your blood. Our fathers did it under a tree but they had their impis ready. (In English:) Public Relations. —

She unwound the turban, feeling through her freed hair as if for some inkling of what he saw had happened to her. Nothing; one of his mysteries. — I knew you were bored.—

But the fantasy sprang from convictions, however unreasonable and inappropriate, outdated, they might be, that could not leave him. He had lived a whole life by them; whole lives, different personae. Traitors come large and small, and those who commit petty treachery, apologizing to the enemy, abasing, licking backsides, are no more fit company than the informers who infiltrate a liberation army and are confined in camps where no one may admit to being an interrogator, no one may admit to knowledge of what that meant. What has to be done in war is terrible and if this is to be forgotten then so has that committed by traitors — that’s it? Yes, that is it.

This was Didymus’s mystery. His moods, the contradiction he could not speak of, turning inside himself without the acceptance that is resolution. The old silences that were necessary between him and his wife when he came back to their exile home from a mission, the weeks and months he could not speak of, had returned between them although now they were really at home, together.

And then something happened. Human affairs move in natural uncertainty always, deaths and lives and eras end in illness, old age — and accident. And accident is exactly that: something unplanned, unforeseen by anyone.

Assassination is planned. Assassination is determined. There is no uncertainty; pure intention. Assassination axes jaggedly through the fabric of life, the bearable and borne, tears the assuaging progression of past into present and future. Murder strikes the lives corollary to an individual; assassination rips the life of a country, laying bare ganglia that civil institutions have been in the process of covering with flesh. Assassination is a gash.

The death of an old leader can be understood and taken into continuity in the sense that his work was done. The assassination of the young leader, outside his gate, that day like any other — there’s no sense to be made of it except in the mind of the one who held the gun, no sense although the priests and ministers may speak of commending him to God’s keeping, the prayers speak of laying him to rest, and the funeral orators assure that his spirit lives on. His place and work was on earth, here, now , not in God’s keeping, wherever that might be situated; he was for action, not rest, and the survival of his spirit is claimed in many distortions to the purpose of the crazy pleasure of looting, burning, and killing, licence taken in the name of revenge for his death.

But the irreplaceable, no matter how obviously so, must not be so, even in the confusion of loss must be replaced. With his assassination the meaning of the position of the young leader in negotiations becomes clearer than it has ever been; his presence carried the peculiar authority of the guerrilla past in working for peace. If men like him wanted it, who could doubt that it was attainable? If a man like him was there to convince his young followers, could they fail to listen to him?

Didymus was one of those who put on again the battle dress he had worn in the camps and the bush, a persona that was no disguise but his ultimate self, and bore the weight of the coffin on his shoulder. He had read in the paper that morning a letter signed with a white man’s name that rejoiced in revenge that the man being carried to his grave had lived by the sword and deserved to die by the sword. He had been angered by the letter, but now, with sorrow palpable on his shoulder, he felt peace in himself and for the man he carried, at having had to accept the necessities of living by the sword prepared to die, as he had been, by the sword.

In the days following the assassination of the young leader, when the gap left by it had to be closed and a successor chosen, he and his kind were sought out and consulted.

Didymus had worn the battle dress again, emerged out of his past. The day had come — aborted from the logic of history by the intentions of tragedy — too soon.