Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

No one can say when again it will be safe. Safe to do what? Move about freely. Leave the gun at home. At the Negotiating Council sessions Sibongile and others on the hit-list are at least conveniently gathered in one place. Young men from the liberation army are on guard; grown plump and relaxed after the austerities of years in bush camps, they stand close among themselves, like schoolboys at lunch break, when their share of the refreshments provided for delegates is handed out to them. To be accustomed to precautions may be exactly what the hit-men are waiting to happen to their targets. Any routine, even that of watchfulness itself, becomes absent-minded: once you get used to being at risk that is when you are most at risk. That is when the opportunity arises for you to be taken in a way not foreseen. A surprise. Those singled out on the hit-list remind each other: go out to the corner shop for a newspaper on a quiet public holiday morning, there’s nobody about so early, it’s not a movement habitual to you that anyone could predict, just to the corner, that’s all, and when you come back you get a bullet through the head, not once but three times, to make sure. The last surprise of your life.

Sibongile has the compulsion to leave nothing half-done. The most trivial task; before she leaves the house in the morning she goes from room to room, putting things in place, fitting new batteries in the cassette player Mpho has left empty, sorting the disorderly files Didymus piled on the kitchen table, as if these tasks will otherwise never be completed. She is agitated at any disagreement left unresolved when Mpho closes the door behind her on the way to the computer course she now attends, even at the casualness with which such daily partings take place. She will rush to snatch a kiss on Mpho’s cheek and watch, from a gap in the blinds supposed to be kept drawn so that movements inside the house may not be followed, while the girl’s high little rump pumps under her scrap of denim skirt as she hurries. Didymus finds notes in various places. He sees they are not Sibongile’s usual reminders to herself but instructions for others that would keep continuity in life if she went out, like the one who bought a newspaper at the corner, and did not get back. He says nothing. Crumples the notes and aims them at the kitchen bin. He himself had never succumbed to the temptation of rituals of this nature; but then he had had the talisman of disguise.

They continued to sit in the house in the evenings, he reading or at the computer making notes for the book he was expected to write and she studying documentation from various committees who reported to the Negotiating Council. Would it happen when she went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of that rooibos tea which in her old fussiness about her health she thought was good for her? Or when she said, I’m off now, and, on the way to bed, in the bathroom would have time only to turn the taps on? The slam of a door or the crack of gas exploding from a car’s exhaust in the street made them both swiftly look up; then Sibongile assuming careless haughtiness, and Didymus wryly smiling to her. Mpho sat with bare feet up on the sofa arm, little mound of well-fed stomach showing in her slouch, rustling a hand into a packet of her favourite cornflakes as she watched the TV parody of their lives in simulated violence and shootings.

Sibongile and Didymus went about as a team, and with others on the list were the initiated, set apart from people who had not been singled out, even close comrades and friends. These did not seem to know how to deal with the situation, though the victims appeared to be managing the unimaginable well enough. Vera Stark came to the house fairly regularly with silent Ben. What was happening in the Starks’ lives? At least this was one way of getting friends off the subject of the List, away from the endless going-over who was behind it. Vera is battling with the Advisory Commission on Land Allocation—‘as usual’, she dismisses. They talk of the first sitting of the Technical Committee on Constitutional Issues due soon, assuming she is going to be part of it. Didymus is not resentful at himself being passed over; the threat of death, close by, drains ambition of all importance, for the time being. — You’ll be taking leave from the Foundation next week, then. — He grins and gives a tap on her hand; wonderful she’s been chosen. Vera glances at his assurance, a moment of exchange between them.

— Yes. Next week.—

It is the first Ben has heard of a decision to accept. He studies her in his silence, he is alone in the room among the others. She doesn’t look at him and he sees that her profile— thumb momentarily tested between her teeth — asserts that her life has no reality for her in the context of the situation of Sally and Didy, this stage-set on which, in a dread adaptation of Chekhov’s maxim for the theatre, a gun whose presence is unseen but everyone is aware of may go off before the end of the act, before the Technical Committee makes its measured deliberation and a new constitution is created under which — it is the only hope — assassins come to realize that the gods to which they sacrifice have abandoned them.

Ben half-believes, has to believe, Vera has spoken only to ward off further questioning about the Committee, she doesn’t want to discuss her indecision. For these old friends, Sally and Didy, he is coaxed out of his preoccupation by a sense of Didy’s need for distraction, for a show of normal interests, and he offers that his business is in trouble. Faith in the promotional value of Zairean crocodile, South American lizard and Cape ostrich skin luggage with gold-leaf initials and logo was low in these times of recession and political uncertainty. The sanctions-busters who liked to travel equipped this way had had their day, and the succeeding affluent class who would come when sanctions were lifted and unemployment dropped, were not yet in place. He joked dryly against himself, for diversion; the irony of his attempt to secure the old age of his Vera, a woman like Mrs Stark, by profiting from the vanity of the Government’s officials, expressed in contrast with the distinction of his face, his black eyes deep as the eyes of antique statues suggested by dark hollows. — The regime’s ambassadors know they’ll soon be recalled for ever, no more boarding for London and Washington with a dozen matched pieces.—

— Well if you’re selling off stock cheap, I wouldn’t mind a smart new briefcase. Doesn’t matter if it has some Pik Botha or Harry Schwarz initials and the old coat-of-arms, I don’t care even if it’s embossed with a vierkleur, 5 I can always stick one of Mpho’s decals over it. — Sally matched the spirit. — And maybe if you’ve got any off-cuts handy we could order a nice holster for Didy. Something cowboy-style, you know. The lining of the pockets in his jackets is getting worn from the weight of the damn gun carted around all the time.—

— Some people wear buttons on their lapels, I wear the gun, that’s all.—

— At least you’re not the only one. Everyone carries guns about these days … without your reason. — Vera turned to Sally. — Ben even wants me to keep a gun in my car …—

But Vera is small fry. A terrible privilege to which Sibongile and Didymus belong changes and charges everything about them, to the outsider; the sound of their voices in the most trivial remark, the very look of their clothes, the touch of their hands, still warm. When every old distinction of privilege is defeated and abolished, there comes an aristocracy of those in danger. All feel diminished, outclassed, in their company.

The Island is ours.

Vera’s house is empty.

Promotional Luggage closed down, bankrupt but honestly so; Ben paid out creditors, owed nobody anything. He did not know what to do next and to disguise this went to fill the interim with a visit to Ivan in London. Ivan had parted from the Hungarian; a treat offered, Vera anticipated for Ben an interlude of male companionship between the generations without the intrusion of women. What would Ben do, around the house, while Vera was occupied and preoccupied, every day, every hour, between the Technical Committee and her attempts to keep in touch with work at the Foundation? Shop in the supermarket? Bennet? Regard himself as retired? Take up as a hobby, like joining a bowling club, the sculpture whose vocation he had given up in passion for Vera? Vera was his vocation; Promotional Luggage had been intended to provide for Vera.