Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

Sonny was the one who knew what it was she rejected in the only way possible for someone like her: by silence. She spoke, with Sonny; when he came to see her for the first time, having been introduced a few days before by one of her brothers (the correct way to approach a girl, in her kind of family), they seemed to take up a conversation that had already begun, with him, in her silence among others. They mistook her gentleness for disdain; perhaps he mistook it, too, in another way, taking the gentleness for what it appeared to be instead of the strength of will it softly gloved. No-one knows the reserves that remain even in the most profound understanding between a man and woman. Aila had not known how to flirt, had never given a moment's attention to the thought of any other man as the singular being, lifelong friend and lover, a 'husband' meant for her; if she gave Sonny everything else of herself, it would have been worth less if she had not kept to herself some fibre of personality as a separate identity. Perhaps without his knowing what the element was, it was that which added to their love for each other his particular, unspoken respect for her — a sacred quality outside the subjectivity of passion and affection.

There was passion and affection. They married after a formal engagement — he even bought her a ring with a chip of dia-mond — and were not lovers until they were husband and wife. They never used endearments in public or displayed the behaviour expected of people to prove they are in love with one another, but there was a real body under her clothes, a lovely body with all its features there for him: the dark nipples like grapes in his mouth, the smooth belly with its tiny well of navel, her entry satiny within as the material of the nightgown her mother had provided for her bridal 'bottom drawer'. All their long dreamy talks about their lives before they knew each other, their life as they were going to make it together, ended with him almost stealthily moving into her, and the pleasure that came to them both always as if a surprise. They were greatly moved, each by the other. The emotion expressed itself in sensitivity, telepathy. They arrived, often without discussion, at the same decisions affecting their lives; and in discussion, in daily responses, a way they wanted to live timidly evolved between them. Domestically they adjusted to one another as cats curl up in accommodation before a fire.

They decided to have children, but not more than two. The fecklessly begotten families of the poor, from which they came, were not for them. Yet they did not plan to privilege these children beyond the decencies of opportunity and healthy, happy growth they believed were a child's right. One of the early sweet intimacies between them was that both had rejected any religious beliefs, although to please the old people she occasionally followed public rituals. They found that for them both the meaning of life seemed to be contained, if mysteriously, in living useful lives. They knew what that was not: not living only for oneself, or one's children, or the clan of relatives. They were not sure what it was; not yet. Only that it had to do with responsibility to a community; and that could only mean the community to which they were confined, to which they belonged because the law told them so, in the first place, and that to which the attachments and dependencies of daily life and the shared concerns that came from living within it, made them belong, of themselves.

Sonny felt his way was obviously through a special responsibility to the children in the school: it opened out from conscientiousness in teaching his own classes to an accountability for the welfare of all the children at the school. He saw the need to bring together the school and the community in which it performed an isolated function — education as a luxury, a privilege apart from the survival preoccupations of the parents. He bought books that kept him from Shakespeare. He read them over and over in order to grasp and adapt the theory that recognized social education of the community, the parents and relatives and neighbours of the pupils, as part of a school's function. He started a parent-teacher association and an advisory service for parents, collected money for special equipment for handicapped children, took groups of senior boys and girls to do repairs in the yard rooms of pensioners. What else might he do? For the uplift of the community he enterprisingly approached the Rotary Club and Lions' Club in the white town with respectful requests that they might graciously send their doctors, lawyers, and members of amateur theatre and music groups to lecture or perform in the school hall.

It was not so easy to find a way for Aila. There she was, in the watchful quiet of her readiness. She, too, had matriculated, but she had married from the close female domain of her parents' home at eighteen, and never worked in the world. He did not want a bed-and-board wife and she wanted to become what he wanted, so she took a secretarial course and studied psychology by correspondence as preparation for a useful working life. His poor salary was reason enough for her to need to earn; but that was not their primary concern. While she was pregnant with their first child they spent the evenings over her material from the correspondence college, he helping her with her assignments. When Baby was born, the young mother would sit at her books between feeds and household tasks, and the young father would be on the other side of the table, correcting his pupils' papers. He read out howlers to her and they softly laughed together, parenthetic to their concentration; sometimes Baby interrupted them with colic cries, sometimes his long-fingered caress on his wife's neck, across the table, or the touch of her hand placed momentarily over his, led to love-making.

They bought their furniture on hire purchase. On Saturday mornings went by bus and later in the car they had saved for, to shop in town. Baby was dressed up in white frill-topped socks and Will had his safari suit with long pants, a miniature of his father's Saturday outfit. Sonny and Aila carried their week's supply of groceries in the plastic bags whose O.K. Bazaars logo identified families like them everywhere in the streets, wage-earners who had to buy in the cheapest store, with the weekly indulgence of ice-cream cones or peanuts for the kids and the luxury of queueing up for weekend beers on the side of the liquor stores segregated from where white people were served.

Like some sudden growth pushing up after rain, these people appeared in the town on Saturdays, covering the streets with trailing children and window-gazing men and women studying the advertised down-payments on bedroom 'schemes' and lounge 'suites' named to bring to cramped and crumbling hovels the dimensions of palaces, 'Granada', 'Versailles'. During the week the throng vanished, obediently banished back to the areas set aside for them outside the town. The workers were in the factories, the schoolteacher went to his designated school; men, women, children — everyone kept to the daily pathways worn within that circumscribed area. In the town, the lawyer and estate agents and municipal officials moved unjostled about streets expanded, spacious, swept of the detritus of Saturday's common usage. A white town.

Sonny and his wife did not covet 'Granada' or 'Versailles'; with an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion. (False values — but that was what he was to call them only later.) Yet the couple were not set apart in any outward way from the crowd of their kind who came into the town every Saturday to buy from the white people. With their children by the hand, they passed the town's two cinemas without particular awareness that they had never entered, could not enter. When Sonny's family was hungry he bought chips from the Greek's shop and he and Aila carefully put the crumpled paper, wet with vinegar, into the municipal trash baskets when the children had finished eating as they walked; the Greek had a few tables set out with fly-spotted artificial flowers and tomato sauce bottles, at which people could be served, but not this family. If — as always- the children needed to go to the lavatory, the parents trotted them off down to the railway station, where there were the only toilets provided for their kind, although the department store had a cloakroom for the use of other customers. As some lordly wild animal marks the boundaries of his hunting and mating ground which no other may cross, it was as if the municipality left some warning odour, scent of immutable authority, where the Saturday people were not to transgress. And they read the scent; they recognized it always, it had always been there. There was no need for notices spelling it out; there were only a few of these in the town, on public benches, for example. There was none at the library; but no-one would have pretended not to know what there was to know about that building from which the scent came, disguised this time as the smell of books, the cool must of yellowing paper, scuffed leather, and the wood-fragrance absorbed from the shelves where they were held, as brandy takes flavour from the casks in which it matures.