Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

Ben and Vera exchange regular telephone calls. Tacitly they were supposed to alternate but if a week passes in silence when it is Vera’s turn to call, he will call instead.

When the phone rang late at night she knew it was him.

He heard the rings and followed them through the empty rooms of the house to find her: the stoep-study under the gooseneck lamp, the piece of fruit she had beside her when she worked at night, the kitchen where she would be squeezing a lemon to make herself a hot drink, the bedroom where her body emerged from her clothes in an unconscious ritual he could have described.

Usually she was in bed, her arm went out for the phone. Each gave an account of those of their activities they thought the other would like to hear. There were pleasantries, small anecdotes. Ivan had had a party and one of the guests had brought a two-year-old boy who had been put to sleep on Ben’s bed and wet it. Vera had been driven round the block on the back of the motorbike Adam had acquired and brought to display. Ben asked, with in his disembodied voice the assumed concern of one to whom such things are a story in the foreign news pages of a daily paper, how the negotiations, committees and commissions were going, and whether the killings were as bad as it seemed on TV flashes. She asked if Ivan was away in some other capital or at home with Ben. He reminded her of routine obligations she might forget — he knew how little time Vera had to think of such things. Licences to be renewed, tax returns — although she was the sole earner now. She passed this over quickly: another kind of reminder, one she wished to avoid, for him — the failure of Promotional Luggage to provide for her as he wished. This was the progression to the moment when there was nothing left to say. In a pause before goodbye — she was lying looking at the ceiling as if she were a stray fly walking there in the silent room — his voice reached her. — Are you lonely.—

— No. — A laugh. — No.—

After she had dropped the receiver she cringed with remorse. She must pick up and call him back, call Ben, Bennet. Say what? If she could lie to him before, times before, why couldn’t she find it in herself to give him a lie to grasp at, now. She turned out the light and slept, her empty house drawn up around her.

Forgive me, for I know quite well what I do.

Ben and his other beloved, Ivan, were having a good time in London as bachelors together. Ben was in a rage of sorrow no one knew of. A rage of sorrow for all Vera has done and will never know. And if she had? Would things have been different, better? If he had told her that he had felt another man on her, in her, those years, he knew that she was enjoying two men at once, she was capable of it then, he knew there was a flat or a hotel room somewhere she came from, back to him — would she be lonely without him, need him now? Oh not as in the mountains, the delicious and wonderful seduction of him by someone else’s wife. But as the husband he became. He saw that Vera never ever really wanted a husband — only for a time, when it excited her to have her lover domesticated, a kind of dressing-up in other garments, perversely, looking after babies together, telling each other confidences, having friendships as a couple, tandem in political beliefs even if she lived them in her work, risked herself, while he built the beaver dam to shore up, provide for her … the dam that breached, wrong enterprise for the wrong era. Not that she cared about that; it was part of her not having wanted a husband, ever, not the first or the second: not needing security, which he supposed is what a husband represents to most women. She’s getting old and she understands something about security, down there he’s far away from, he can’t fathom. She’s getting old, even his Vera’s ageing; and she’s not lonely. He searched himself for the bitter comfort of her inadequacies, the things in her that irritated him. She had no plastic, tactile feeling — except for flesh, of course, fondling him, making him rise in terrifying excitement, stroking his lips and eyes, she used to, telling him how beautiful that face of his, that he still bears with, was. A mask for a performance he can’t take off. He has all the time he’s always needed for reading, now. There is exegesis in everything he reads. Going back to the books that had been the essential texts of his youth, rereading Rilke, he seems sought out, signalled to: Vera is Malte Laurids Brigge’s ‘one who didn’t want to be loved.’ ‘That inner indifference of spirit’: it was written of Vera. And he was reading an Irish poet — not Yeats this time — he wanted to let the words tell her that although he’d failed to share the credo with her in the end, he understood: What’s looked the stronger has outlived its term, I The future lies in what’s affirmed from under. (But it’s the beauty of the assonance, perhaps, that holds the meaning for him.) She had listened in his arms when he read poetry to her, Yeats and Lorca, in the mountains, she had said she was entranced. Entranced! Vera never read anything but newspapers and White Papers, Blue Papers, a house full of Reports. For her the condition of existence was what happened in the power of politics, while the very power of life itself, the all-beneficent sun, god-symbol eternally of a future rising, was turning out to be the source of death rays humans are letting in upon themselves by tearing their only shelter, the atmosphere. She nagged him to ‘keep up’ sculpture in his spare time of being a husband; she didn’t know volume, shape, the smooth skin of wood and the grainy one of stone, and the full time these needed. She favoured her daughter openly, cold Annick, and seemed, even when he was a baby, her firstborn, to have some kind of unexplained resentment against her son, perhaps because Ivan was formed in her image — did this mean Vera did not like herself? God knows. Lover, husband, you never know the one to whom you are these. He wanted to call out, call out to her — Yeats again — lines that came back to him as a blow: What do we know but that we face I One another in this place? He hated — not Vera, but his dependency on loving her. He has gone away knowing that he does not know how to carry on his life alone.

Didymus gave evidence about the camps. It became necessary, for the cause, to go further than a report. He was to speak in open inquiry of what he had had to keep to himself. A change of self-discipline; in a career of exile, infiltration, guerrilla battle, spy and spied upon, he was accustomed to such switches. The Movement itself announced to the press and conducted the investigation.

What is the difference between a criminal and a hero? He had thought about this with the particular form of revolutionary sophistication — the nearest to irony a revolution may allow itself to get, because irony is distancing, a luxury, like expecting a soft bed when waiting in ambush to kill. While standing ‘trial’ before his comrades instead of the last white government’s courts, it’s hardly a matter of justifying his actions in the name of a just cause, the end against the means. It’s a matter of fulfilling whatever is needed by the Movement to show its integrity to the truth, its capacity for self-examination and condemnation because it is strong enough to survive these, a capacity others dare not attempt. He tells as much as is needed to demonstrate that the Movement may emerge with a cleansed conscience. He tells himself it is a mission like any other, suited, as all have been, to a particular stage in liberation.

When the press badger him with questions contrived to make him express bitterness etc. so that they may have a sensational story about divisions within what they call the ‘upper echelons’ of the Movement, he disappoints them effortlessly with a well-worn formulation, one of the printer’s lugs of rhetoric. — I’m in complete agreement with the principle of accountability we have always rigorously followed.—