Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

— I know. I know you do. — It was an atheist’s declaration of faith: in a man.

They sat in unnoticed silence for a while, closer in their difference than they might have been in agreement, with others.

When politics turns to gangster methods the vocabulary that goes along with these is adopted. The slang of the TV crime series people amuse themselves with night after night becomes the language by which planned killing of leaders and those close to them is termed. There is a hit-list, there are hit-men. Just like the movies — but these tough guys are not actors behind the get-up of balaclava helmets they wear, they are individuals convinced by others that they have a mission: to save this or that political ideology, racial or national formation, religious belief.

It is only after an assassination of a leader has successfully taken place that the hit-list is released to those whose names it comprises. No one gives a ministerial or official police explanation for this, so that an explanation offers itself out of the very circumstance: those in officialdom who kept the list to themselves had among them some who were involved in compiling the list and providing the hit-men. But there are so many formations, so many intrigues, so many messianic claims for exclusive destinies not provided for by any Bill of Rights, that there could be any one of these responsible. If there is an arrest — and most times there has not been — the unlikely individual seems a strange being (produced in an unlikely period in the sense that nothing is like it was for so long) who could have served any of them. For although they squabble solemnly among themselves their yearning is the same, they yearn for the impossible (escape from history, Vera Stark would call it), the reinstatement of life as it was before. They are prepared to kill for that, although nothing will bring it back; assassination is an offering for which there are no gods left.

Sibongile Maqoma is on a hit-list. A telephone call came while she was turning over some chops under the grill. Mpho, who always rushes to answer a ring in the evening in the certainty calls are for her, yelled through the sizzling to her mother, and Sibongile picked up the mobile phone she has resorted to, like her beeper, to make her life manageable. When she heard the slowly emphasized voice of an Afrikaner speaking English she quickly, with the free hand, signalled to Didymus, who was opening a bottle of beer, to go and listen in on the receiver in the living-room.

There had been one or two abusive calls since she had become a member of a multi-party commission in negotiation talks. Pushed under the front door, a note written in straggly capitals called her a black bitch who should keep her cunt out of politics — but to be told over the telephone in that steady monotone (the man might have been reading a grocery order) you were listed to be murdered! If the Colonel had sent someone to talk to her, to tell her; but a telephone call!

She rushed to the living-room giggling on a high note, shaking. Didymus and Mpho stared as if the threat must somehow show on her. — It was so casual, I felt like just saying thanks but my chops are burning—

Mpho flung herself on her mother and started to cry. Sibongile struggled to lift her face and chide her lovingly, don’t be silly, nothing’s happened, I’m all right. — But he said they’re going to kill you— Didymus took over, his arm round her. — You’ve got it all wrong, he said her name is on a list, a whole list of other people, some names jotted down, that’s all. Your mother’s not a real target, she’s not one of the top leaders, is she.—

— But she’s up there, isn’t she, she’s sitting there, she’s part of the discussions those awful people want to stop. They hate us! They hate her!—

Mpho had not been told about the note under the door; but they could not fob her off again by telling her, don’t be silly, it’s nothing. She sat with her head on her father’s shoulder; Sibongile repeated exactly what the police officer had told her. She had at least resisted her disbelief sufficiently to ask where the list had come from: it was not in the interest of certain investigations to reveal. That’s all. They calmed the girl, Sibongile taking her hands, turning the silver and elephant-hair rings on her fingers, Didymus stroking her hair, while they talked, as of commonplaces in their lives, of the possibilities: which group might be responsible for the list and how the police found it. In someone’s house, office — where? But Didymus was experienced in these matters. — It’s come from the cells. They’ve got someone to sing.—

Under her fear, Mpha was taking the opportunity for regression, becoming a little girl again. — Daddy, you must get the police to guard us, you must.—

— My darling, you couldn’t be sure that’d be the best thing … But we’ll be careful.—

— But how can you be careful! You can’t stay inside all the time. Look what’s happened, if you go to the corner shop just to buy a newspaper, just down the road, they can drive past and shoot you as you come home, right at the gate. I’ll be like the other girl at her father’s funeral — I saw her on TV — seeing my mother put in the grave—

The phone rang again and she jumped up in reflex to answer it while Didymus called after her. — Don’t tell anything to your friend, whoever it is.—

There were no gods for them to turn to, either. No new state, not yet; no Security that was not at the same time part of the threat. The feel of the house, that was home at last, changed. The dimension of rooms stood back, fragile. The painted burglar bars that had come along with the house were toys to keep out petty thieves. The locks on the doors — nothing, to a force that had the keys to everything in everyone’s life, that had sent them into exile and let them in again. They carried on with routine lives during the day and at night sat on the furniture Sibongile had bought, as in a waiting-room.

Adam’s and Vera’s approach to one another came about through faulty objects. She did not know how to make real contact with him, nor he with her (if he bothered to think about it at all); and it happened of itself. Fixing things. As if some side of him he wouldn’t have wished to admit to, hidden under the boldness of getting drunk and losing a licence, there was the guilty pleasure of tinkering, of making objects other than souped-up motorbikes work. It started with the washing machine, from which water wouldn’t drain after the rinsing cycle, and now it was the computer in Vera’s stoep-study. They were before it together, she on her swivel chair and he crouched beside her. She showed him how the machine either did not respond to or disagreed with her instructions, he watched and tried it for himself. It seemed as if the two of them, beginning to laugh at their own frustration, ganged up in argument with a third person of stubborn obduracy. — Let it cool off a bit. I think I’m getting the idea.—

— But what makes you think you can put it right!—

— Well I’m coming to something … we’ll start over again in a minute. — He went to the kitchen and fetched two cartons of the guava juice he had become addicted to in his father’s country. They sucked at it through straws.

If machines were the train of thought in which they best met it was easy for her to maintain it. — Wha’d’you think makes my car suddenly begin to stall instead of idling? It’s really annoying, yesterday every time I came to a traffic light: engine dead. I suppose I’ll have to go to the garage and they’ll expect me to leave it there for half a day, a whole palaver, I’ll have to arrange to borrow someone else’s at the Foundation … what a bore.—