Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

She came to the trial. It was her professional duty. She was often there; when he and the others with whom he was charged filed up from the cell beneath the court and turned smiling to look for relatives and friends in the gallery, she lifted a hand in reliable greeting. Aila could come only occasionally, she was receptionist to an Indian doctor at his city rooms in the lower end of town, and on Saturdays, when he did not consult there, the court did not sit. The doctor was generous in offering her time off, but Aila was conscientious, it was an article of faith between Sonny and her, part of her loyalty and support for him, in prison, that they would not let the State destroy the discipline of their daily life. When she could come she brought him jackets and trousers fresh from the dry-cleaner — as no longer a detainee but an accused on trial without bail he was allowed such humanizing privileges, and it was a tactic, displaying high morale to the judge, to confront him day after day with alleged revolutionaries looking like businessmen. Aila knew Hannah Plowman, who was monitoring the trial — the young woman had kindly come to the house once, while Sonny was still a detainee, to offer her organization's help — but they did not sit together in the visitors' gallery; the young woman had her colleagues, people from the churches, representatives from foreign embassies, a colloquy exchanging mouth-to-ear observations and analyses of how the Defence's case was going. Aila sat among the other wives, mothers, fathers of the accused, big peasant women in crocheted hats who rested deformed feet out of shoes worn lopsided, young pregnant women with defiant profiles under beaded lovelocks, grey-woolled old men wearing Church of Zion badges. Sonny would pick her out at once, there in one of her white blouses with the bow looped through her string of seed pearls, the plastic folder from the dry-cleaner neatly arranged across her lap so as not to crease his clothes.

At the tea-break, when the court had risen for the judge to retire, the colloquy of observers surged forward sociably along with the relatives. Couples embraced across the barrier of the witness box but it was not Aila's and Sonny's way to kiss on the mouth in public, their intimacy always had been too private for exposure. She leaned on the barrier and he held her hands folded together in his; and then she released herself, her eyes so brimming with dark, so shining and solemn, and handed over the dry-cleaner's bag with explanations of stains that couldn't be removed, as if this were the most important exchange between them. And they talked of family matters, although there was no restriction except political discretion on what they might say softly to one another, for these few minutes, here. Every other moment they were interrupted by his putting an arm out behind her to shake hands with a fellow prisoner's relative, or he would have to turn away — gripping her wrist or upper arm, through the cloth, to keep the precious contact with her hidden self — to talk to one of the observers about some point they ought to make when seeking support for the Defence among influential people abroad. Sonny had to share out the brief interval of the judge's tea-break like this because he had become spokesman for his fellow accused: the studious ex-schoolteacher had a way with words.

Will came, and Baby, when the trial continued through the school holidays, and Will, so tall already, eyebrows beginning to grow together in a crossbow, just like his own, kissed and hugged him, laughed, didn't want to let go. But Baby cried, and an extraordinary distress came over Sonny. There in the babbling company of the tea-break, the court where police stood at every exit deceptively sluggish as dogs who will attack at the first move, he was overcome by what he had done, got himself into this prisoner's dock, going to be shut away in a cell at the end of the day's hearing; suddenly possessed of an urge — jump the barrier, take this poor girl-child of his and break out. Aila was at work; the children had been brought to court by one of the lawyers. The young woman who was monitoring the trial, who had been once to the family house, appeared at the girl's side and comforted her, smiled away Baby's embarrassment; and Sonny's panic died down without anyone noticing his moment of weakness, more shameful than the natural emotion of a daughter whose struggle was only with adolescence.

As the picture of the first time he saw her — the young woman monitoring the trial — was reconstructed only later, so the meaning of the moment when she came to comfort his daughter was interpreted by him only later, growing in its power over him, a sign. It was then that it began, that it was inescapable. Needing Hannah. He could not think of what had happened to him as 'love', 'falling in love' any more than, except as lip-service convenience, political jargon expressed for him his decision to sacrifice schoolmastering, self-improvement, and go to prison for his kind. A spontaneous gesture quite in the line of her professional concern for prisoners and their families: she walked across the gallery of Court A into a need that clanged closed, about the two of them.

It was the creation myth of their beginning. That it was not recognized as such at once, by them, added to its beauty. He was a political activist on trial for promotion of boycotts and participation in illegal gatherings. Police videos were shown by the State prosecutor where the accused was speaking on the platform. In other gatherings his identification was disputed by the Defence: Counsel made everyone but the judge laugh when he dryly drew attention to the fact 'plain to see on his face' that this accused had a distinctive feature — his eyebrows. But the lighter moments in evidence and the cheerful atmosphere of airport reunions at tea-break were the 'humanized' part of a process whose purpose was to send these men, who already had spent many months in detention, back to prison as convicts; part of the processing of all opposition to the State pulped into prison. Sonny, like his comrades, was preoccupied with writing notes for the lawyers to use in his defence. Under the effort to recall precisely, exactly, where one had been, whom one had seen, what one had said on occasions over the three years on which the State based its case, all immediate impressions, however indelible, extraordinary, were thrust away.

Sonny was sentenced to five years. On appeal, before another judge, sentence was reduced to two.

— It's bearable. — The first thing he said to Aila when she was allowed to visit him before he was transferred to maximum-security prison. — It'll pass before we know it. — There had to be objectives to make it pass. — Baby'll be working for her matric — I'd like her to have some extra coaching when the time's near. I'll certainly get permission to do some study, myself. — He gave instructions on many practical matters— but didn't want it to sound like making a will, he was leaving her for only two years, not a lifetime. She took the instructions as supports to hold, until his return, the life they had made together. They filled the visit with a rapid, determined exchange of plans. — Not five, remember; only two years. — They smiled at each other continually. When it was time for Aila to go he discarded the ritual — expressions of confidence that she would manage, admonition to take care of herself — he could have taken refuge in to disguise the parting for a definitive period of their lives. This parting between them deserved more than that. He said, Write to me, Aila, you must write to me. She did not speak. She put her arms round her husband and kissed him on the mouth, in front of the warders. He saw that, not to shame him, to strengthen him, she pretended not to see the tears rise in his eyes. He saw that as she walked out she put up a hand to set a stray strand of her hair to rights, as well.