Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

He lay on the bed, a tramp who has broken in. He got up and wandered, looking at the jottings in Hannah's handwriting, but did not read open letters addressed to her. And then, the telephone: and with its croo-croo croo-croo it was their room again he was padding over intimately in his socks, to hear her. Each did not use the other's name (for discretion); there was always a lot of smiling and laughter, and certainly she must hear in his voice that he was at once sexually aroused by the sound of her, but on this day after the initial pleasure there was an urgent break, out of which she told him:

— Don't be alarmed… not good news. I've been P.I'd*—I think. — Oh my god. How d'you know?—

— A letter came yesterday. I'm duly informed I must apply for a visa. But I'm sure it'll be all right. — Have you told London?—

— I spoke to my director right away. They're already working on it. And several people here. By the time I've wound things up I'm sure it'll be fixed. I couldn't come back for another few weeks anyway — I've got to decide what to do with the old house, the books — I'm giving away the furniture, such as it is, but the books… and the papers… the papers must be preserved. What d'you think? They want them for the little archive here but. I'm inclined to believe I ought to look after them—

Agitation was invading his whole body. — Listen. Something must be done at this end. I'll find out.—

— Don't, don't. Please don't. I don't want you to get mixed up.—

An unexpressed struggle between them hummed across the distance. He severed it for both. — But you must come back, you must come back.—

When he had put the receiver down, it seized him: because of me. Because of this room, it's happened. But she was gone. He was desperate not to be able to pick up the receiver at once and tell her, it's because this place has been an everywhere and they know it and they think you've been seduced — not to lie in that bed but to run as courier for the jailbird and his cause.

But when they talked again on the next third day he could not tell her; he could say nothing over the telephone. He could not tell her how, playing chess with his son to steady his nerves and enable him to think rationally (thank god Aila wasn't there, thank god he wasn't alone) he examined and discarded different ways to set about getting the order against her re-entry rescinded. He tried out, in his mind, taking one of the comrades into his confidence, a militant, worldly priest whose liberation theology would include an understanding of a man's responsibility for loving, inside or outside conventional morality. Father, I need advice. But no. A prisoner of conscience, you sit in detention, on trial, convicted for the liberty of all your people. That conscience takes precedence over any conscience about a wife and family left to shift for themselves, and over any woman you have need of. The comrades might know about her; probably did. But as an irrelevance. The struggle is what matters; and he and they are at one in dedication to that. Nothing that could be seen to deflect his attention from the struggle should be evidenced in him, who has even given his daughter for liberation. Particularly in the present phase, of factionalism. He thought of the merchant, by colour one of their own, who gave money — as insurance for a future or maybe out of real conviction, a Bakunin — but who also must know high government officials who would woo his support for their policy of privileging a middle class; perhaps he was the man to approach. He thought of the white newspaper editor who was challenging the government, front and editorial pages, over suppression of press freedom, and was too influential among whites to be refused meetings with cabinet ministers. A small favour might be asked of him. But newspapermen — they sniff out the perfume of a woman the way certain creatures (the schoolmaster picked up such oddities of information in his reading days) can detect the presence of truffles under the ground. 'Sonny' the platform speaker ex-political prisoner and Hannah Plowman, representative of an international human rights organization. Next thing, there would be a reporter at the door, and if he himself were not there, well, the son would be better than nothing. Will would be asked if he could say anything about the refusal of a visa to this friend of the family who monitored political trials.

As a hypochondriac runs to his doctor with every personal problem transmuted into a diagnosable ache or pain, he went to the lawyer who had represented him during his detention and trial. Metkin looked like a rabbi and listened as his client thought a psychiatrist would listen; in this presence of contemporary and ancient wisdom, divination, surviving between the telephone and intercom on a desk, Sonny felt humiliation as he might have been experiencing some physical urge. He was explaining that he wanted to hand the whole matter over to the lawyer; he himself could do nothing to help anyone in conflict with the authorities. This person had no-one else to speak for her, within the country; she was not in contact with her few relatives, and they were not the sort of people to act in this type of matter. Whatever the government did they would believe was justified.

But he saw in the lawyer's face that he had explained nothing, and he tried once more to evade the complete understanding there. He sat back in the chair on the other side of the desk and looked into eyes black as his own, the eyes of old races. — She's an invaluable person.—

Despite the unwelcome understanding of the lawyer he felt relieved — when you are in a political trial every hidden motive, every vestige of contradiction, every hesitation of purpose must be confided, so that you may be defended even against your own high principles, the dangerous licence of confidence cannot be revoked. The matter was in hand — the lawyer's soothing phrase. For results, one must be patient; and as she said, she could not come back for some weeks, anyway.

Right from the first day she had been less alarmed than Sonny; he realized he had discounted the preoccupation of her feelings at the loss of her grandfather, who had been also a father — and mother — to her. She was back there sorting the old missionary's papers and simple possessions, sorting through her childhood, unable even to point it out to him in passing as he had done the place in the veld outside Benoni, to her, when they were driving by. Action on her behalf was being taken at home and in London. He was kept busy planning and running workshops—'resistance education' (the name he coined for it, approved) — in shanties and mud churches, under the guise of local club meetings, since the National Education Crisis Committee was restricted by a ban, and in the spare time he would have been able to spend with her there was the quiet house, thank heaven, with only the boy around. And Will was less hostile, sometimes it seemed even possible to touch him. Ah, without women, what is always subliminally taut between men is relaxed. The boy was a man, almost a man. He could be trusted; hadn't he proved he could be trusted, he would not even meet your eyes to show he remembered. If told to forget he had heard someone visit the house he would do as he must.

The men who had come that night sought to form a cabal (how poor and melodramatic the political vocabulary was) to oust certain leaders. They were 'putting out feelers' to individuals from several organizations to see who was 'like-minded'— sidling euphemisms. They had not succeeded in gaining a recruit; but they read a certain distraction in 'Sonny' as reason to take the chance that he would allow himself to forget they had come, and give no warning to anyone.

There was something on the stoep. A bundle.