Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

— Well you have, haven't you. — It was spoken simply, with admiration, no flattery.

There was a beat of silence.

In it, Sonny looked at her face without a decent reserve, as he had not freed himself to, before. Thick-fleshed, pearly-skinned modelling with slight scuffed redness here and there when her fingernail or some rough cloth had brushed it; the defining presence in the colour of the eyes, as the enamelled eyes brought to life the beige stone of colour plates in his book on the art of ancient Egypt. He was aware that there was saliva in that mouth and that blonde hair would have a scent of its own.

—'Happy for battle'.— He murmured it over. — I've wanted to ask where it comes from — I've wanted to find out who said it. — He laughed, excited at the idea: —To read what goes with it, for myself. — She watched him, enjoying his enthusiasm, her chin drawn back underlined by the flesh of her neck.

— Rosa Luxemburg, writing to Karl Kautsky. I'll bring you the book. Oh there's so much in her letters! I look forward to what you'll have to say—

Joy. That was what went with it. The light of joy that illuminates long talk of ideas, not the 60-watt bulbs that shine on family matters.

A long time had passed since his political activity had been confined to his own kind — the sub-division of blackness decided by law — and the single issue of removals. In prison he learnt more than the correspondence courses in local government Aila had arranged for him. He had been educated by his fellow political prisoners in the many tactics that evolve from principles of liberation, and how they are unceasingly extended, adapted and put into practice as each issue, however big or small, provides the opportunity, wherever and however. Where people lived in wretched conditions in a ghetto he was one who would be sent to help them set up a residents' association; when they understood that a rent boycott was a good way to protest, he would be among those to teach them how to organize the campaign. Where miners or municipal workers or workers in a sweet factory or brickyard were on strike, meetings in their support had to be held, T-shirts and stickers had to be seen on the streets until they provoked a ban, and even after, by those people who were prepared at least for a small defiance displayed bobbing against pectorals or breasts. Days of commemoration were arranged in honour of those who had died in uprisings, strikes, school and rent boycotts, street battles with police and army. And all this had to be done anonymously, clandestinely, hoping to escape the eyes of the police, on days and nights when it was better for no-one to know the whereabouts of an absent member of a family.

Sonny was not a major figure but he was frequently one of the principal speakers where it was possible to hold a public meeting in the semi-legality of some church or university. Hannah was always there. One day of freak cold in April (snow on the Drakensberg too early for winter) the jostle of the group with whom he was coming down from the platform of a city church hall converged with some rows of the audience leaving by a side door, and Sonny and Hannah found themselves drifted together. It was not unexpected, just lucky; he had seen her in the fifth row of seats. They left the hall into the cut of icy wind, into the sights of the police movie crew's cameras which await people who attend such gatherings as in other countries television crews wait after galas to record the emergence of film stars.

They turned the corner in the direction opposite to that being taken by the crowd. His face screwed up against the wind, he smiled at her. — So now we've had our snap taken.—

— D'you think they'll send us a print?—

He was high-shouldered against the cold and laughing; they paused a moment, didn't know where they were headed, along that street. He had on only a shirt and light jacket, but she always had garments to spare, it was her style. She took off her striped knitted scarf. — Please. Put it on, you'll catch pneumonia. Go on.—

It was all matter-of-fact. Comradely. — Thanks.—

He wound that scarf round his neck, tucked the fringed ends under his jacket. The scarf was warm with her warmth. In the gritty cold of the street, the sensation lay upon his nape.

Joy. From something so slight.

They were friends for some time before they were lovers. Before the ultimate joy of making love with someone who, too, is in the battle, for whom the people in the battle are her only family, her life, the happiness she understands — as he now does — is the only possible one. She told him afterwards she knew it would be hard for him to allow himself to become her lover; she was satisfied to be his friend so long as that satisfied him. But once they were lying naked together for the first time she made a solemn condition. — I wanted this. Yet I don't want it at all if it's going to replace our friendship with something else.—

He raised himself on his elbow in her bed to look at her with honesty that doesn't belong in bed. She thought he was about to take the opportunity to tell her right away that he loved his wife, his beautiful wife whom she had seen, visited, shared concern with for his welfare, and to tell her that she herself must know the strict limits of this share of him she was taking. He lay back again. — You are the only friend I've ever had.

That's what I feel. Now. That's what making love with you has told me.—

The immense reassurance sent her venturing deeper into the territory of intimacy. She wore a curio-store filigree ring, and she began cleaning the dried soap from its recesses with her thumbnail. — And when you first knew Aila.—

She didn't exclude Aila; it was one of the things he found remarkable about her, moving, that she did not want to oust Aila — from his mind, when they were together. She conceived of Aila as an equal, not an adversary defeated: she didn't refer to her as 'your wife'. He was filled with. gratitude, yes. No guilt, no concealment between them, with her; everything that had remained hungry, stunted, half-realized, streamed towards her through opened gates.

— We were so simple. You can hardly imagine. In Benoni's coloured township. Such simple people. And young. I think, you know, our understanding was too easy. The first layer. And you believe that's all, that's it. For myself, I'd say I didn't know what I needed.—

Needing Hannah. And now she was there, she had discovered Sonny for himself. She was a euphoria natural as a pulse beat with him wherever he went, in the house with him when he came home after he had left her, making him oblivious to the hostility of the boy (after the business of bumping into him at a cinema), making it possible to perform as a father and husband. A husband! Aila was not an emotionally demanding woman — imagine Aila! But she was accustomed to the quiet occurrence of conjugal love-making, that as the children grew up had become less and less frequent, more peripheral to loving. When a daughter begins to show breasts and a son's voice begins to be mistaken, on the phone, for his father's, there comes a kind of reversal of the clandestinity courting couples have to practise in the house of their parents: the long-married now feel an inhibition about making love in the presence — separated only by the bedroom walls — of children who themselves are now capable of feeling the same sexual desires. Of course, this never would be said openly, between Aila and him; but it must have been there, and it meant she didn't expect — she didn't expect him to expect — to make love to her more than occasionally. And this periodicity surely had been extended by the two years in prison. It did not mean there was no physical contact between them. On the contrary, once in the dark, wordless, Aila always moved into his shelter, against his chest or round his back, and neither was roused by the warmth of his genitals against her or the shape of her breasts in his hands. They would fall asleep; fall away from each other only in sleep, as they had done for years, as they cleaned their teeth before bed and she creamed her hands.