Nadine Gordimer: None to Accompany Me

Vera’s annexe was really too small for her to have visitors there; only Adam, on his motorbike, occasionally arrived at a weekend, and once took her with his girl-friend to hear a jazz group from what he thought must be her era, in a café crowded with young blacks and whites to whom the music was quaintly new.

Perhaps he had had a request from Ben. Ben was reassured (guilty, somewhere unacknowledged in himself, at leaving her, even if this was for her reasons) that at least she was living on what must be the safest kind of premises, in present conditions, the property of a prominent black man not overtly involved in politics. But he worried about her way of life, apparently so completely involved, in public, always part of group thinking, group decision, and so withdrawn outside that. Ben searched for her in her letters without success. Ivan, just to satisfy him, suggested she might have taken up some mysticism or other, Sufi or something. No, no — how little could a child know of its own parent! Ben at least had gone far enough with her in her life to know that, wherever she was now, it was not a form of escape. He was diffident to explain to this being who was so much like her in the flesh (the face he addressed himself to made it seem to him it was her he was talking to) that she belonged to the reality back there as he himself never had, never could try to, except through her. Ivan occasionally wondered why it was apparently impossible for Ben to go back; but it was a bargain he made with himself that if he didn’t pry into the parents’ lives they wouldn’t pry into his own. He and this sometimes strange father were close on their own terms; there was no financial burden, he was making plenty of money; so long as he himself didn’t find a woman he really wanted to marry they could go on perfectly well living together in odd bachelordom. His colleagues rather admired him for his affection for this handsome ageing parent they encountered in the Holland Park house. Evidently he had been an artist of some kind. According to Ivan, he kept himself busy going round the exhibitions.

One winter night in that year a pipe burst, flooding outside Vera’s annexe, and she put her leather jacket over pyjamas and went to turn off the main water control in the yard. The tap was tight with chlorine deposits and would not budge in hands that became clumsy with cold. She quietly entered the house. Vera always had access, with a second set of keys Zeph had given her; she kept an eye on the house while he was away on business trips or spent a few days with his family in Odensville. The keys were also a precaution Zeph insisted on for her safety; if anything or anyone threatened her, a woman alone, she could come to him. The disposition of rooms in his house was familiar under her hands in the dark. She would not disturb him by turning on lights. She was making her way without a creak of floor-boards or any contact with objects to the cupboard in the passage between his bedroom and the bathroom where she knew she would find pliers.

Without any awareness of a shape darker than the darkness she came into contact with a warm soft body.

Breathing, heartbeats.

Once she had picked up an injured bird and felt a living substance like that.

Through her open jacket this one was against her, breasts against breasts, belly against belly; each was afraid to draw away because this would confirm to the other that there really had been a presence, not an illusion out of the old unknown of darkness that takes over even in the protection of a locked house. Vera was conscious of the metal tool in her hand, as if she really were some intruder ready to strike. For a few seconds, maybe, she and the girl were tenderly fused in the sap-scent of semen that came from her. Then Vera backed away, and the girl turned and ran on bare feet to his bedroom where the unlatched door let her return without a sound.

Vera came out into the biting ebony-blue of winter air as if she dived into the delicious shock of it. She turned off the tap with the satisfaction of a woman performing a workman-like task. Instead of at once entering her annexe she went into the garden, the jacket zipped closed over live warmth. Cold seared her lips and eyelids; frosted the arrangement of two chairs and table; everything stripped. Not a leaf on the scoured smooth limbs of the trees, and the bushes like tangled wire; dried palm fronds stiff as her fingers. A thick trail of smashed ice crackling light, stars blinded her as she let her head dip back; under the swing of the sky she stood, feet planted, on the axis of the night world. Vera walked there, for a while. And then took up her way, breath scrolling out, a signature before her.

1 Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging. A white militant right-wing resistance movement.

2 Transvaal Provincial Administration.

3 Literally ‘auntie’ in Afrikaans. Originally respectful, became a way of referring disparagingly to any middle-aged or old woman.

4 Azanian People’s Liberation Army.

5 Flag of the old Transvaal Boer Republic.

Nadine Gordimer’s recent books are My Son’s Story (1990) and Jump and Other Stories (1991). She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She lives in Johannesburg.