Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

What a thought to have about my mother. But when you are lying, in your presence at the table, in every expression on your face, in everything you customarily do, going in and out to school, fooling quite naturally over the telephone with friends, you can't imagine anything that isn't devious, anymore.

The whole world is lying, fornicating and lying.

I was at that party. Baby and I were there, first helping with the preparation of food and rearranging the furniture. Baby, carrying a gift of snacks, went with him to our neighbours to tell them there'd be music until late that night; from the day we moved in, my mother had established good if distant relations with these whites. They didn't know about prison, about his political activities — one look at my mother and their Afrikaner fears that our skin meant dirty habits and noise they'd tolerate only from their own colour, were groundless. Everybody drank a lot — not my father, and my mother doesn't drink at all — and Baby was over-made-up and amazed all those people with her wild dancing. She was good, but showing off to the men. I danced a few times, after a beer, but I could feel myself getting angry every time some tannie said I was growing up handsome as my father, and I could see him, his face painted with the sweat of his hospitality, shining pride. I don't remember whether he danced with that woman. I can hardly picture her there at all. The moment when she arrived I was passing with a bottle of wine; it was the first time I'd seen her since the cinema and I'd thought about that face so much I could scarcely recognize it — this pink, scrubbed face, blonde hair springing back into shape like the coat of a wet dog, she must've washed it just before leaving for the party. She was smiling comradely at others' greetings, not at me. A moment when suddenly I didn't believe it: she had materialized, and his woman, that I had — like him, I know — always in my mind, vanished. My mother was signalling to me across the room at the group who were waiting for wine. There was a pretty comb in my mother's tight and shiny crown of hair, she was neat and beautiful, with the special care she took to dress for parties; she so enjoyed feeding people.

Baby cut her wrists when she spent a Saturday night with a friend. She didn't even do it at home, where she had her own room. You think of details like that — crazy — when you don't have any explanation for what has happened. She didn't die. A mess in somebody else's bathroom and some stitches on the inner side of her wrists where you can see the freeways and bypasses of veins just under the skin. Baby is light-skinned, like my mother, not like my father and me. When she was in bed, repaired and sedated by Dr Jasood, for whom my mother worked, my mother came and sat down in the kitchen where I was reading the newspaper because I did not know what I should be doing; he, my father, had taken his briefcase that morning and said he had to be away that weekend. He had looked heavy-limbed, as if he had to make himself go; she must have believed there was some grave political crisis taking him away. She sat on the edge of her chair and looked at me as if she had known me her whole life, not just the span of mine which had begun in her body. As if I were her son and not her son. She said Dr Jasood had just told her it was evident to him that Baby took drugs, that her great liveliness was deep unhappiness. He had been at that party.

She said to me: —What can we do for her?—

The slight emphasis on 'we' gave away, all at once, that my mother knew about my father. That she knew — without knowing how — I knew. She discounted him — couldn't count on him, couldn't call on Sonny, now, wherever he was, even if he were to be hidden from her only round the corner, he was too far away. I understood. What could we do for my sister: a family that ours had become? And at the same moment it came to both of us: what Baby's 'deep unhappiness' that the doctor diagnosed was about.

So Baby knew, too. It was just that she managed differently what she knew. The hip, hyped style she flaunted on street corners (out of sight of my mother; I saw her), the flip and vulgar way she — brought up in the sound of my mother's quiet voice and the poetry of my father's Shakespeare — talked; the emotional outbursts over trifles, that my mother put down to the strain of having had my father in detention and on trial during the time when her menstrual cycle was being established; her manner of distancing herself from the childhood she and I had in common — all these were her attempts to manage.

When she had said to me, D'you expect him to be moping around like you? — was she trying to defend my father? Did she think, then, I didn't know, and probably would find out? Good god. Had she, all this time, been taking his part against my mother? As I tried to shield my mother against him? Female against female. Male against male. So what could we have done for her. To stop her cutting her wrists when she couldn't manage.

What could my mother have done for her.

What could I, her own brother, have done for her.

What a family he made of us.

Poor Tom's a-cold.

And now joy came often. After prison, where there was nothing to please the senses, where there was not even enough light to read and study by, came this bounty. It flowed from such slight stimulation. They met again for the first time at a house meeting. It was called a debriefing; those who had been inside related their experiences in resisting interrogation, intimidation, solitude, for the benefit of those who might sometime find themselves inside, and for individuals and organizations who sought the best means of supporting those on trial, of which there were many. She sat there with her knees broad apart under one of her long skirts, balancing on her lap the briefcase that served as a table for the notebook. She wrote earnestly. While others spoke, while Sonny spoke. When he paused, her gaze flashed up, narrow-blue, the blonde eyelashes met at the outer corners of her eyes as the lids pleated in a slight smile of encouragement.

Joy.

Hannah met Sonny for coffee, for further discussion. It was possible — to take one's dark face into a coffee bar. And with a white woman companion; to pull out her chair for her and sit opposite her. It had been possible for some time, although, coming from a small town where such barriers fell more slowly if at all, and after two years in a segregated prison, Sonny still had a strange feeling: that he was not really there, a commonplace meeting of this kind was not happening to him. Then they drank coffee and she smoked and said, through the wraiths that undulated between them, he hadn't changed. In two years. — You look very well. Fine. I thought that at the meeting.—

Her approval was sun on his face. He closed his eyes a moment as he smiled. — Aila was ready to feed me up. But as you can see… I put on weight inside. But not fat, really? I've never exercised so regularly in my life! Never had the time, before.—

— You look so much better than you did when I saw you in prison.—

— Ah well. detention is terrible. Much worse than a sentence, where you're sure when the end will come, even if it's years ahead — you know as well as I do.—

— Not as well as you do. Or anyone who's been inside. I know only from the consequences I find, if I get to see people.—

— I never want to live through that again. — It was a confession; both knew he might be detained once more.

— It was still great to find you in such good shape after two years of the other kind of inside. I suppose it wouldn't have been so striking if I'd seen you during that time.—

He suddenly found it easy to say to her, in her warming presence: —The letters were almost like visits, to me. In some ways, better. because you can read them over. A visit ends quickly. You and the other person never say what you want to say. Tell me — there's something I never asked you when I wrote back, I wanted to ask you like we are now. I mean, actually here… When you wrote that first time, you said something… you knew I'd come out happy for battle—