Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

Adam stayed on for a while in Ivan’s room. He and Vera had the curious loose accommodation of individuals who, though vastly divided by age, by the commitment to ideals in one and the lack of ideals in the other, are at some base alike in following their instincts and will. His grandmother did not give him advice (the one occasion on which she had done so was to protect her friends rather than himself), make his bed, sew on his buttons or supervise his activities, so she was no grandmother. They took telephone messages for one another, ate independently at no fixed meal times whatever was in the refrigerator or each left for the other in the oven, sometimes met up late at night and chatted like contemporaries simply sharing a convenient roof. At one of these incidental meetings he remarked that a friend had found a cottage in Bezuidenhout Valley and wanted someone to share it. A week later he moved out in a party atmosphere, borrowing Vera’s car to make several trips with the possessions he had acquired, helped and hindered by the to-and-fro of volunteers among his friends. There was fondness between Vera and him but both knew they would see one another rarely once they did not sleep under the same roof. The family roof: it was that, the house built in the Forties in the style of whites of the period, half colonial bungalow and half modernist with a split-level living-room and coloured slate stoep they called a patio, the house provided for the young bride and their soldier son by people who did not know what they themselves were, part of Europe or part of Africa; the house that was Vera’s loot by divorce, the roof under which she took her lover home, where her children were born, where the ‘patio’ meant for white teaparties had been converted to a study where strategies for restoring blacks to their land were worked out. In every room the house retained the life lived there. Scratches and stains, makeshift (bookshelves built of planks mounted on bricks) the newly married lovers, caring only for love-making, nothing for material things, had made do with. A sculptor’s chisel among counters from a children’s game and someone’s collection of labelled stones, rose quartz, crystal, geode. Clothes hanging limp, lost the shape of the body that wore them, never given away because someone (Annie?) once had had the intention to pick them up some time. Boxes that hid the remains of Promotional Luggage, ‘vanity’ cases and elephant-hide wallets nobody wanted to buy. The scent — her own particular body-smell of the house, independent of the perfume she used — of the documents and newspaper cuttings she hoarded, a calendar of her days and years, live as paper in its organic origins is, secretly wadding together in damp and buckling apart thinly in heat. Broken pottery, a Mickey Mouse watch stopped at some hour in childhood, postcards and photographs. It is impossible for anyone, tidying after the departure of a sojourner, not to stop as Vera does and look through photographs come upon. It is then that she turns up, once again, the postcard photograph sent to Egypt during a war. She had not thrown it away, torn it up; only slid it back under all this other stuff.

And who was that?

I’m the one in the photograph whom no one remembers.

It was within this calm that she worked with the Technical Committee on Constitutional Issues. What came out of the Committee would be anonymous in its effect on millions, only a small sample of whom she had known and knew, and whose lives she had affected personally, the people of the Mogopas and Odensvilles. She and Zeph Rapulana talked together under the jacaranda as perhaps they would not, elsewhere. It was necessary to believe that elections and the first government in which everyone would have a vote would stop the AK—47s and petrol bombs, defeat the swastika wearers, accommodate the kinglets clinging to the knobkerries of ethnic power, master the company at the Drommedaris; no purpose in giving satisfaction to prophets of doom by discussing with them the failure of the mechanisms of democracy, of elections ‘free and fair’, in other countries of the continent.

— At last — a year, a month, an actual day! — our people are coming to what we’ve fought for. They can’t be cheated! It can’t happen! Not to us. We can’t let it! What a catastrophe if people started thinking it’s not worthwhile voting because whatever they do the old regime will rig the thing.—

She took his determination as a reviving draught. — But if we’re going to deliver the goods there has to be a real anticipation of what could happen, Zeph. How to deal with the Homeland blacks who’ll still want to keep their petty power even if their territories have been reincorporated into the country before the elections. What if their alliance with the white right-wing holds, grows? What if the white generals become their generals? And the regular army becomes their source of weapons?—

— They have to be shown — absolutely, no other possibility — they can’t win. After all the years with their guns and their armies, after all the thousands they’ve killed, all the laws they’ve made, all the millions they’ve robbed of land and chased about the country to take it for themselves, they had to let Mandela out of jail and sit down and bargain with him. Didn’t they? They must know they can’t win! Not even if they do what UNITA did in Angola and refuse to recognize election results when we win, not even what Babangida did, and declare elections null and void. They can’t win.—

— So somehow they must be convinced to take what’s offered them. But this has to be done now , they have to be accommodated somehow, before. And that may betray everything.—

— How everything, Vera?—

— If we have to give in to that crazy idea — the white extremists — the bit of the country they want exclusively for themselves! The ultimate laager. What corner of the country doesn’t also belong to others? What about the blacks who live there, or once did? The land, Zeph, the land. You know all about the land. We promise redistribution of the land to the people and then we so much as consider giving even a metre to those who stole it in the first place? Are we going to start endorsing people out again, this time in the name of the good of unity, one South Africa, one people? And are we going to have to settle for federalism, or some sort of regionalism that’s a disguise of federalism, so the old power blocs of whites — maybe with some black satellites, or their alliance with ethnic ambitions — remain?—

— We’ll deal with that with regional powers, that’s being tackled. The regions aren’t going to be a disguise for anything. It’s a difficult game, but it’ll come off.—

— But the other! Those whites we laughed at until they drove an armoured car into the negotiations building.—

— That track goes nowhere. They’ll run out of steam. You and I can’t tackle that one, Vera. — He was kindly amused at consideration of the presumption. — We have to trust the leaders to find the right signals to send them on their way. We can only stick to what we’re doing. Each of us.—

Chill comes quickly these afternoons. The last light intensifies evergreen foliage to black, with a brush of thin gold across the fading jacaranda that will shed only when winter ends. In pure radiance far off a plane floats silently, linking their vision as their eyes follow it. The presence of shrubs rises. And then the incineration of the vanished sun blazes a forest fire behind blackened trees.

In some eras what would seem the most impersonal matters are the most intimate. Becoming part of the massed design of the dark, there was nothing either felt more intensely than these political fears and exaltations, no emotion that could draw two individuals more closely than this. A strong current of the present carries them headily: this is the year when the old life comes to an end.