Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

As he stopped, coming through the bougainvillea which concealed the side entrance to the garden, he saw an object; suspiciously — explosive booby traps as well as ordure can be placed on the doorsteps of political prisoners' friends. Coming closer, he made out a sleeper — some meths drinker must have found the deserted cottage convenient to camp against — then, seeing that the sleeping bag was new and a man's hand (young, white, with one of those twenty-four-hour military format watches on the wrist) was visible over the hidden head, stopped again.

Who was Sonny to intercept an intruder. How could he account for himself, approaching this cottage, key in his pocket. He had better go away. Come back later. The telephone would ring and not be answered; he called out as if the place belonged to him — What do you think you're doing here! Hey!—

The hand flew away from the head. A young man struggled out of the bag, unembarrassed, with a sleepy glance of recognition, confirmation.

Sonny had never seen him before in his life.

The young man circled his shoulders in their sockets to ease stiffness and breathed deeply. He had pollen-coloured spiky-cut hair too short to be tousled by sleep, a woman's pretty nose and long-lashed grey eyes, and a man's dark strong growth of a few days' beard. He half-smiled, and nodded, as if his man had arrived as summoned, on time.

— This is private property. What do you want here? — This person knew him; must have seen him in newspaper photographs.

Or it could be on video as one of the Security Police's film stars. He believed he had learnt to be alert without becoming paranoid, but the place where this intruder was waiting — waiting for him, clearly — her cottage, their room, to which he would return again and again, unable to keep away, and the move— the entry restriction timed to get rid of her without arresting or deporting her — these circumstances experience entitled him to interpret as put together by the people who knew all about him, the majors and sergeants who had interrogated him in detention, watched him through the Cyclops's eye of his cell door in prison, and were aware, without seeing, when she took him into her body in this cottage. He, like all his kind, educated in political struggle, knew them, too; the majors and sergeants. He knew what could be ready to follow the circumstances: re-detention, blackmail — not with money, between police and revolutionaries there is a higher exchange, the selling of trust. Not a domestic affair, telltattling to the wife that you're playing around (their kind of vocabulary) if you don't answer questions satisfactorily. They know 'Sonny' wouldn't betray his comrades for that; the wife knows about his blonde and she's the submissive type who would forgive him, anyway. Then what? What? His woman in Lesotho; but if they had wanted to strike one of their dread barters with him (we'll detain her for the political confidences you've made to her, unless you give us some confidences) — if they wanted to do that, they would have kept her in the country, not shut her out!

The young man was standing there, the jeans, the sneakers, the haircut, like any roadside figure thumbing a lift; but in front of her door. — We'd better go inside.—

Sonny gave an authoritative high laugh. — Look, you take your bag and get out of here. Just go.—

— I've got something to tell you. But inside. From a friend of yours. I was with her the day before yesterday.—

— I'm not expecting any messages from anybody, and I want you out of here. I don't want to know who you are and where you come from.—

The young man listened with assurance and condescending understanding. — All right. I have some sort of fancy credential. 'Sermons in stones, and good in everything'.—

The young man was living in the cottage while he was back at the house with his son, Will. It was what Hannah asked of Sonny, her message: let this person stay in the cottage, give him the key. The key? He stood in a hardware store while a duplicate was cut, and a slow depression sank his gaze to the tools and gadgets that furnished other people's lives — his own, part of Saturday purchases, when he did house-proud repairs in the first, the ghetto home.

The man called himself Nick, since there had to be something to address him by. She must have thought the clandestinity of the cottage was ready-made for another kind, as well; a good place for an infiltrator. As it was known she was away, no-one would have any reason to approach it. And the people in the main house? What about them? Sonny was choked with such questions during the phone calls, unable to ask her anything, unable even to indicate that the guest had arrived and was in the room while the call was made, since he went out only at night. Did she understand it was dangerous for her lover to be in the cottage with this guest even for the duration of the phone call? If the man were discovered to be in the country, were followed and picked up, Sonny would be picked up with him and detained for interrogation about his association with him, charged with aiding and abetting whatever it was he was doing— and what that was Sonny could not ask. The discipline of the struggle prevailed between them; each to his own task. But when the young man was asleep (he slept during the day) Sonny went through the cupboards and likely places in the cottage where guns or explosives might have been stowed away; he would not allow such material to be there to compromise her with some charge that her cottage was in fact a cache for arms. He could not warn her that she might come back and step straight into a Security Police vehicle. He could only say: don't hurry back, take your time…

The young man slept in the big bed close to the earth. He did not wake, when being observed. His socks hung on the radiator where her intimate garments had. Sonny left food for him in her kitchen each time and went away for another two days. When he got back home he would call out, Will? But he always knew whether or not the boy was there; like his mother's, his presence could be sensed.

All dogs love me, no problem, the young man had told him when he asked about the dogs raising the alarm when a stranger came and went through the garden. But the people in the main house must nevertheless notice there was someone coming to and fro at the cottage. Someone other than himself, the man they must think of as her man. Perhaps, unlike himself, they expected a woman like her, free-living, alone, doing some kind of leftish good works, content to hire converted servants' quarters, to have men coming and going. Perhaps they had known of some other man before himself.

One afternoon the young man was gone. When Hannah phoned, on time, he couldn't tell her that, either, but the spirit in his voice and the caressing chatter that came from him must have told her for him. He felt strongly sure she would soon be back. He had never cleaned house before — in his kind of family women cooked and cleaned, only his son, wanting to differentiate himself in every way, helped out in the kitchen — but he stripped the bed, swept the room, found the product with which to wash the bath. The man had left behind, shed, his hitchhiker's outfit. Must have changed persona for the next stage of his mission. In the bathroom was an open bottle of hair bleach with a picture of a grinning blonde combing flying tresses. But Sonny's Hannah needed no bleach or paint. He threw out the bottle with the bundle of clothes, it was the day of the week the dustmen came to take away the white suburb's trash and he saw, in the lane as he left the cottage by the hidden gate, one of the black men rummage the bundle out of the mess of newspapers and kitchen debris and consider the usefulness of the garments as other than a disguise. Sonny smiled, felt that it was right. A conclusion that restored balance to something he found distasteful and distorted, a means he did not want for his ends. Sermons in stones, and good in everything; that was not to be used as a password, in the mouth of a third person.