Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

They scamper after him with the weapon of their microphones. — You don’t feel you’re the fall guy? You’ve been victimized?—

— How? — He appears indulgent of stupidity. — After more than three hundred and fifty years of victimization by one white power after another, I should feel ‘victimized’ by a normal process within my own liberation movement?—

And afterwards, although there’s now no possibility of concealing his involvement with the camps, there is also no need for this in order to ensure that Sibongile’s advancement will not be prejudiced. The death threat provides the highest proof of political correctness of the potential victim. Paradoxically, the reputation of Sibongile is unassailable.

Vera and Didymus suddenly caught sight of one another as each was approaching the pay booth in an underground parking garage. He walked with Vera to her car and at a gesture both made at the same time, got into the seat beside her. There was something clandestine about the vast dim cellar of a place, evilsmelling of fuel fumes, and cold; as if the context of their encounters, just as some people are likely to meet at concerts, bars or libraries, was set when the umfundisi stepped into her house and she kicked the door shut behind him. They didn’t talk of the inquiry; if Vera was curious she knew enough about him to keep her curiosity to herself. They talked of Sally. She was the one on missions all about the world, now, delegate to this country and that in search of funds for the election campaign. She was tipped for a portfolio in the cabinet when it came. There were newspaper photographs in which she could be picked out among Japanese and German dignitaries and Scandinavian politicians; Vera saw that the Portobello Market boots and African robes had been succeeded by a wardrobe of suitable international elegance for her position. The two in the car were proud of her, as if from the same perspective; when someone becomes a public personality and gains an image distinct from an intimate one, he or she regains the remove of being ‘someone else’; Didymus spoke of her as of a stranger rather than one whose being is dulled by familiarity. — At least she’s safer when she’s overseas. And she’s doing so well! She has this way of getting to people and dealing with these institutions — you can tell she does her homework, when she meets them she knows exactly what their resources are, their pet prejudices, what they like to fund. And tough! No pledges, she says: cheques, not promises. And she gets them, too. How she can charm … just watch her, sometimes …—

— She’s always been beautiful, that helps.—

— But now! — The two words are almost a boast. Vera understands something else about any kind of public distinction: the individual with such an image remains sexually tantalizing despite the passing of years. Ben beckons distantly. She catches at a disembodied wisp of telephone voice, words that are going round lost in her space. — Ben saw her in the foyer of some hotel. One day in London. He said she was splendid.—

— Ben in London? When did that happen? When’d he go?—

Neither he nor she was prepared for the strangeness into which his cheerfully ordinary remark had fallen.

— He’d already been gone a long time.—

Didymus did not want to be drawn into confidences with this woman, old friend from the days across the colour line. The private relationship of his secret visit in one of his revolutionary personae was not licence for her to speak to him of that other privacy, between husband and wife. It was something only a white woman would have expected. Yet he understood what she was telling him; understood out of the balance and imbalance of withdrawal and closeness experienced between himself and Sibongile. But in their case it was surely all due to factors outside themselves, to the struggle and what that meant in all its phases. Whites, even Vera and Ben, surely had at least some intimacy safe from these things? If he had allowed himself to say: I’m sorry — that would have acknowledged he understood, and burst discretion for her to pour out God knows what, Ben with another woman, the usual story. In and around the Movement there were many such; when political action is the only imperative, the sexual emotions rebel.

— Ivan’s still over there, isn’t it? Big boy in banking, man, that’s really nice. We must get together and hear all the news when Ben gets back. I’m expecting Sally next weekend, with luck. She’s in Los Angeles and coming via Bonn. You know that Mpho’s got a scholarship to study drama at N.Y.U.? — Here was an area of confidence to which both belonged since Vera had taken responsibility for a mishap in the girl’s life, along with her parents. — Much better, for a girl like Mpho, than computers — she’d never have stuck with that, hei. Not with her temperament. Sally fixed it.—

Vera returned to the empty house at night in complete self-forgetfulness; and met herself. The curtains she went about drawing across the windows, the angles of walls she followed, the doors she closed as she passed from room to room sheltered and contained only her. Her house, acquired dishonestly, that she never should have kept; that house was still with her, it was, in a sense, her sole and only possession, the only one she had carried with her through everything that had come and gone within and around her, Mrs Stark and Vera; men, the children she bore them, the communities she saved or failed to save from removal, the deaths of and the death-threats to companions, the terrified traipse of squatters from hostel attacks to refuge, the return of faces from prison and exile, the last white parliament that would ever sit, the swastika rising from the bunker to blazon, with a new twist, on the arms of white vigilantes; the abstract of words, power struggling with the unfamiliar ploughshares of negotiation, the committee she came home from where the needs and frustrations and ambitions of more than three centuries were meant to be reconciled and achieved on paper in some immutable syntax.

Old partners in crime (so long ago it had become respectable, a family home) she and her house were alone together. Ben had put in an alarm system. Like every other dwelling that could be called a house, whether in the city suburbs or the black townships, it was a cage outside which prowlers cruised in their cars or loped along the gutters waiting for a way to get in and take what they wanted. She was not afraid because she reasoned that a house with such a shabby exterior would tempt no one to believe there was much worth taking, inside; and that belief would be correct: her files were priceless to herself and would rouse only disgusted disappointment in anyone expecting valuables; the furniture supplied by parents-in-law for the war bride was worn and abraded.

She would pour herself a stiff vodka with a prickle of tonic water and put up her feet on the coffee-table elevated with stacked newspapers. She watched the news on television and then listened to every other version of it, switching from station to station on the radio. Events were in the house with her, nothing else. The voices of events peopled it, speaking to the preoccupations of her day, and the responses she made mentally were as if she were answering. The evidence of personal life was around her; but her sense was of the personal life as transitory, it is the political life that is transcendent, like art, for which, alas, she’d never had time after Bennet read wonderful poetry to her in the mountains. Ben himself had so easily given up what had attracted her to him along with his sexuality — his artistic ability, his sculpture. Politics affects and is evolved endlessly through future generations — the way people are going to live, the way they think further. She had no illusion about politics; about her part in it. People kill each other and the future looks back and asks, What for? We can see, from here, what the end would have been, anyway. And then they turn to kill each other for some other reason whose resolution could have been foreseen.