Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

— It’s a matter of degree, whether I sit on boards or you get to be part of the Committee — that’s something more urgent. You’ve never shown any doubts about where I sit.—

— Ah no. Who could have anything to say about that. You’re making a place for blacks in the money world. Even the ex-Stalinists among us want it. There’s no millennium; only the IMF and the World Bank—

— There are plenty who do say! I’m in it for the directors’ fees. I’m living in the Northern Suburbs instead of Alex or Soweto. — He was smiling at her certainty.

She had teased him about that fancy restaurant. She released her tongue sharply against her palate and jerked her head in dismissal of herself and his detractors. To believe in him was to accept that the Left, as expressed in the living conditions of the majority rather than in ideology, can find its solutions to those conditions by using some of the means of capitalism. Looking at the neighbouring countries of the continent, what other solution was there to try, for the present?

— So I should set myself up there among the little gods who are deciding what the country will be. Proportional representation, regions … And what about the Foundation? I’d be away for months, you know. We’re always short-staffed. There’s going to be so much work, things hotting up before a new government comes. People fear the old boundaries will stick unless you can get back to your land first. Places on the borders of homelands that are resisting incorporation with the rest of the country— we need successful court action to claim them quickly, and you know what a wrangle that can be. Problems like Zevenfontein — who, black or white, wants those poor people squatting next to them in a middle-class suburb? And Matiwane’s Kop, Thembalihle, Cornfields — they want their land back. Yesterday I was in Pretoria — again — the Advisory Commission on Land Allocation—

— The old battlefield.—

— Mogopa this time. A hearing we’d prepared for the Mogopa delegation. You know what one of them said to the Commission? ‘The Government is a thief who’s been caught but returned only half he’s stolen.’ The application we’d made for the restoration of those two farms taken from them in the mid-Eighties has resulted in them getting back only one, and it’s Swartrand, the one with less arable land. So we’re contesting. The man burst through our legal jargon like a paper hoop. ‘Now that the land is supposed to be given back to us, there are a lot of talks, talks … the Government is having the power to steal people’s property and afterwards set up commissions.’ And there was one old man, Abram Mabidikama, I can’t get him out of my mind — he said that watching white farmers graze their cattle on Hartebeeslaagte was like watching an abducted child labour for someone else’s profit, ‘while I have nothing’. And then he stood there and he told them, we are going to struggle to get our land back ‘up to the end of time’.—

Zeph echoed quietly, for himself and them. — To the end of time.—

The old man hadn’t said what rally crowds were chanting, kill the Boer, kill the farmer; but like Odendaal when this man sitting opposite her in his cuff-linked shirt-sleeves had said Meneer, we won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children , the Commission fingered their pens, hid behind their bifocals from the menace as Odendaal did behind his slammed door.

— What piece of paper that’s going to be disputed by the gang of the white Right and homeland leaders is more important than the chance to make sure, now, people have somewhere finally to arrive , for god’s sake — to end being chased from nothing to nowhere. At least I know I can do something about that. Someone else can sit on the Committee? It’s easier than to replace me at the Foundation.—

— Many things seem not to make sense because we’re rushing ahead, we have to, and this gets pushed aside for that, gets knocked over so something bigger can go forward.—

— But nothing measures up.—

— No. We have to leave the old standards of comparison, what’s important and what’s not. We’re not just weighing a bag of salt against a bag of mealies, Vera.—

— I’m supposed to sit quietly on an electoral committee while down the road someone watches Sally and Didy’s house, waiting the chance to kill her.—

— Have you seen her?—

— I took a bunch of flowers, and that was all wrong — as if she were sick, or the way we do when someone’s died. She took them from me with a peculiar expression.—

— You should go often. When something is threatening people need to have others coming round. I’ve known that in my life.—

— She and Didy won’t come to our house. It is as if it were a disease. Or a curse. They don’t want to involve anyone else in the risk. Sally’s all bravado, of course, says you never know whether the man knows how to shoot straight, he might hit someone else by mistake.—

The sun had set and the underlit sky was pearly with cloud. She stood up and stretched towards it. They walked together to his gate, sharing the end of the day without domesticity, he did not ask what she was going to do, she gave him no decision. He twisted a yellow rose absently off the bush beside the gate; and then handed it to her. She rolled the stem in her fingers.

— Mind the thorns.—

— Empowerment, Zeph. What is this new thing? What happened to what we used to call justice?—

Didymus accompanies Sibongile everywhere with a gun in the inner pocket of his jacket. On his political record he never would have been granted a licence to carry a firearm had he applied for it; the Movement supplied one, asserting its own form of legality. Not only the State, but those factions within it but out of its control, rebelling at the State’s even reluctant concessions over power, had the whole arsenal of army and police force to seize upon. What were a few caches of smuggled arms— symbolized by the AK-47, mimed, chanted, mythologized— against that? When police protection is blandly offered, behind it is this reality: the bodyguard itself may include in its personnel an assassin. To have that one patrolling the street outside the house, the first home back home, where Didymus and Sibongile and their daughter are eating the evening meal, to have that one sitting behind her head as she drives into the city!

Sibongile looks at the thing, the gun, with distaste, and constantly asks Didymus if he’s sure the safety catch is on, there against his body. But he is no white suburban husband, needing to be instructed how to ‘handle’ a gun — as the professional-sounding phrase used by amateurs as a euphemism for learning how to kill, goes. And he will not, he assures, hit anyone by hazard, the wrong one.

And they both know that if the hit-man acts it will not be while presenting a target. It will be, as it has been for others, a spread of bullets from a passing car, or through a window where she and her husband and daughter sit at table. Didymus will not have time to see a target or fire. The gun is a pledge that has little chance of being honoured. Didymus has long been accustomed to heavy odds in his way of life and all he can do is lead Sibongile through them.

Suspicious-looking individuals hang around the house but they are only journalists; the assassins will not arouse suspicion, or if they do, it will be after the event, as when neighbours remembered that a red car circled the block a few days before the last assassination. Failing to get to the prospective victim or her husband, journalists manage to waylay Mpho, who is quite flattered to be asked how she feels about her mother being under threat, and appears in a charming photograph which she cuts out of the newspaper and puts up in her room. The distraction makes her feel less afraid.