Nadine Gordimer - None to Accompany Me

— I don’t think everyone thinks the Committee isn’t impartial. I wouldn’t say that, Vera. Just a few who don’t understand what impartiality tries for, because preventing ‘abuse of power’ only means to them they haven’t a hope in hell of succeeding with their own kind of domination.—

— But that’s just the problem. You and I, here, we can see those people for what they are, and dismiss them. We know what they are, we’ve decided they’re a dangerous hindrance. But the Committee has to consider all submissions, has to take every one seriously, there we have to correct in each other any personal judgments. Remember I once said to you, a constitution’s the practice in law of a Bill of Rights? Well I’ve found impartiality really means listening to the most obvious contrivances thought up by people who don’t care what they’d do to claim legality to hang on to power, finagle power. The use to which they’ll put beautiful legal formulations! We’re caught up in a jungle of our own negotialionspeak.—

—‘Technical Committee’ … yes … sounds so simple … Like knowing how to wire up some lights or keep the airconditioners going … They could have called it something else. But that’s a hangover from all the names we had, nothing to do with the circumstances we were supposed to believe were described by the names — remember Separate but Equal, Extension of Universities Act, Immorality Act, whatnot … It’s a habit we took over.—

They laughed, matching alone together in the winter sun many of the curious aspects of the changes of which they were part, the time through which they were moving.

If she was grappling in difficulty with what were supposed to be the technicalities of people’s future lives, he had no such officially defined euphemism to protect him. There were scandals in the financial enterprise of empowerment. His face appeared among others in the newspapers they opened. A tangle of loans, debts, transfer of funds from one company to another, and accusations of these being fronts for the Movement. — So are they going to ask you to write into the constitution that no one in a political party can have business interests? That’s something, after the way big business and the mines kept the old regime in place since our grandfathers’ days!—

— How did it happen? Is there really embezzlement somewhere, people you thought you could trust?—

— I don’t like to think so, straight off. We have to sort it all out. It began to get too big too quickly, out of hand. Some sectors — I told you when the figures came out last month how well the insurance company’s investment in housing is going? — they’re doing well, but the papers don’t make much of it. Blacks can’t succeed. They mustn’t. The old story.—

— Wish-fulfilment rumours. But the figures they quote?—

— I wish it was just rumours. Other things are shaky. We haven’t kept strict enough control! … when we’ve seen some of our brothers heading for trouble we’ve baled them out on their assurance it was temporary, we believed them, they believed it themselves! We haven’t learned yet to be ruthless, and that’s the first rule in business, make no mistake; we did. — There came to him the jargon that had entered his vocabulary from the Drommedaris. — Not a question of anyone’s hand in the till. I’m prepared to stick by that. It’ll be a terrible thing for me, Vera, if it is.—

Her eyes moved in resentful alarm. — You wouldn’t be involved directly.—

— No. — His hand blotted the photographs spread across three columns. — But I’d be seen, for good, as being among those who were.—

She took an orange and separated its sections. He was looking at her indulgently, carefully, from the very limit of trust between them, testing if he could even accept, from her, that she might think him capable of theft — for which ‘unacceptable practice’ was simply the Drommedaris name in the world where he risked himself now.

— What would my tenant do? Move out?—

She dropped pips from her lips to her cupped hand and looked down as she ate, as if all she had to do to find the answer was finish a mouthful. — I’d know it’s sometimes necessary to do things now we wouldn’t do in another time. That it was done for a reason, someone, something else.—

He smiled. — Ah no. Be careful. We have to make a lot of new rules but that’s not one. A thief is a thief, Vera. You and I cannot be exceptions.—

— You’d be offending God, wouldn’t you. Yes. But Zeph I’m not so sure about myself; that consideration not coming into it for me. I might decide money would achieve more for the people, in one place rather than another. I might cross funds … A good thing I don’t sit on your Boards.—

— Well if you did, at least you couldn’t be accused of being predictable. Black.—

The scandal died down; or was averted by reorganization. Zeph had many discussions with business colleagues at his house. Of course she was not present, kept to her annexe. Sometimes he talked to her later as a consequence rather than a direct account of these discussions. — Can you imagine, there’s the example of a factory that regularly produces nearly double the amount of each order because the workmanship is so sloppy, there are so many items that come out not up to standard that only half the number can be used to fill the order. The waste! The cost! In money, in man-hours! Low productivity can sabotage completely our hopes of raising living standards in the long run. Our talk all these years about redistribution of wealth and land — when we’ve done that with what was stockpiled for themselves by white regimes, we’ll still be unable to compete in world markets if we don’t raise productivity. We’re far behind successful countries, far behind Korea, Taiwan, China … countries with cheap labour. They produce better goods than we do and on a scale that makes our productivity chicken-feed. We’ve blamed exploited cheap labour and lack of skills training for our failure. And that’s been true, far as we could judge, because we’ve never had anything else but an exploited labour force. But when our workers are no longer exploited, will they produce more and better? What about the old ways? What are we counting on? That when you have black management, a black executive director, if in some cases the State you voted into power is your boss, you’ll put enthusiasm into your work? Motivation. I worry. It won’t be a form of protest against the white exploiter to be caught skimping on the job. No more fifty per cent rejects. We need black management that knows how to make people work.—

Vera watched his face, his manner; smiled. — On board. No avoiding it.—

If she happened to encounter his colleagues in passing he introduced her, hand on her shoulder: —My tenant. — If anyone showed curiosity about this tenant, the ageing white woman who lived on his property, he was pleased to have the opportunity to inform them — Mrs Stark is on the Technical Committee. She is one of the people drafting our constitution.—

The tenant. The designation, for the public, suited her well. It was a kind of private play on words, between Zeph Rapulana and Mrs Stark, linking their present arrangement to Odensville, the matter of land, over which they had come to begin to know one another. It was a consequence in which there were loyalties but no dependencies, in which there was feeling caught in no recognized category, having no need to be questioned. On the home ground of the present — violent, bureaucratic, shaking, all at once, expressed in burnt and bloodied bodies, in a passion of refusal, revulsion against institutions, in the knowledge of betrayal by police and army supposed to protect, in the anger turned against itself, in the prolixity of documents — there manages to exist this small space in existence. Yet Vera felt it open, to be traversed by herself: herself a final form of company discovered. She was able to do her work on the Committee with total attention, she wrote letters filled with news of it regularly, addressed jointly to Ben and Ivan, she telephoned Annie to enquire after the progress of the baby, she visited the Maqomas and marked off in silent apprehension the passing of another week, another month that perhaps meant Sally, alone in her danger, would survive.