Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

— She's expecting.—

The genteel euphemism carried over from back-yard gossip in their old life. He laughed, gently correcting: —She's pregnant. I don't think Will is unaware of these possibilities… So. So that's the reason for the marriage.—

— Oh no. — She paused to have him acknowledge another possibility. — They would've married anyway. They love each other.—

He pulled back the covers on his side of the bed and sat down. — Family life — babies — it doesn't go too well with activism like theirs. Doesn't really do, anywhere, but particularly in exile.—

— Well, they have permission to live outside the camp. — Yes you told us. Her vegetable patch.—

— She's very pleased about the baby. You wouldn't have thought she'd have such strong maternal instincts, would you?—

— When they grow up. what can one know about them.—

— And they're even sure what it's going to be — a boy. There's a test you can have, these days, imagine that!—

Yes, Aila has been brought to life — that's how he sees it— by the idea of a birth, a new life coming out of the old one he left her buried in. Aila looks like any other woman, now, with that same hair — do they wear it to make them seem younger. She'll never sit at the dressing-table before bed, brushing that long, straight shining hair, again. He's rid of Aila. Free.

He slowly swung his legs onto the bed and dropped the covers over himself up to the chest. With closed eyes, a moment, he heard her moving about the room, saw Baby dancing, coming to kiss him on the ear, saw her glittering eyes smeared with mascara. Married. Baby. How could she know her own mind, so displaced, far from home. But in the struggle no-one is underage, unprepared for anything, children throw stones and get shot. — She's so young. — He hardly knew he had spoken aloud: Aila heard it as a momentary lapse into intimacy. She said: —So was I.—

He opened his eyes. Much younger. Eighteen-year-old. Aila had taken a long shining black plait from the toilet bag. It was tied with a scrap of ribbon where the hair had been severed. There was the rustle of a sheet of tissue paper Aila smoothed before she folded the plait within it and put it away in a drawer.

The other woman came back the same week. He had longed for her so painfully it seemed at times he couldn't get enough oxygen into his lungs, breathing was constricted by the intensity of the fear she would not be allowed to cross the frontier, and he would never get a passport so that he could go to her. And yet his only relief from tension over the ambiguities and intrigues that were growing in the movement was to turn to this other anguish, his need of Hannah. And from that anguish back to dismay at the position he was being manoeuvred into by certain comrades.

When she told him on the phone that she was cleared, she'd received a visa and was arriving at the weekend he begged, insisted she let him meet her at the airport although that would be an offence against discretion as well as security — that moral code he and she strictly imposed upon themselves.

He wouldn't come into the terminal arrivals hall, he'd be there in the underground car-park, she'd make her way with her suitcase towards him in the echoing daylight dusk of the cement cavern smelling of exhaust fumes. The empty cottage where he was holding the telephone receiver was already rein-habited by her. He was wild with anticipation: what Hannah could make him feel! Never in his life before — fifty years, my god — had he been capable of such emotions. He was old when he was young, that was it; a reversal: it was only now he knew what it should have been like to be young. The night before Hannah was to arrive he took a sleeping pill to subdue his excitement; to blot out the presence of Aila beside him in bed.

While he was waiting in half-dark, underground, surrounded by the inert relics vehicles become when they are stationary, by footsteps fading, footsteps approaching and passing on the periphery of his senses, he suddenly felt all life and will leaving him. All at once. It was again the moment when, driving somewhere in the Vaal Triangle, full of purpose directed towards the meeting he was going to address, he had had the awful impulse to let go of the steering-wheel, had seen himself careering in a car out of control, to an end, an abandonment. Now in the garage he got out of the car to master himself; he arranged himself standing to meet her when she would appear. He kept swallowing and his hands felt thick and dull. The place was cold, a vast burial chamber. An old black man slopping a mop from a bucket over a luxury car was a menial entombed along with a Pharaoh. She would appear with her suitcase; nothing would stop that happening. There she was, as she had to be: she had seen him, she was coming towards him slowly, ceremoniously, solemnly after so long and difficult a parting, walking sturdily on her pale freckled legs, her body tilted sideways by the weight of the suitcase, her blondness back-lit by the shaft of light coming from the stairs. He felt nothing. He stood there smiling and managed to open his hands away from his body to make way for her; there was nothing behind these gestures. She took his silence and the hard abrupt embrace as an excess of emotion stifled by prudence in this strange public place where there seemed to be no witness except an old cleaner; but of course she was back here, where one could never be sure to be unobserved. She herself was laughing and in tears. On the way to the cottage she poured out all the details of the visa affair she had had to keep back, over the telephone. Her hand came to rest, spread gently and firmly on his thigh as he drove; a claim upon him.

Once they were again in the bed it was as if what had happened down in that cavern had never been. Close to the earth; Sonny was back to earth, human and struggling, able to touch and feel and scent the wonderful upheaval of life.

— He slept here. I used to come in and see him snoring there on your bed. — He shook his head, and she smiled and kissed his neck. — But why did you give him that password, Hannah? Why couldn't you have thought of something else?—

— What else could I have sent that would make you absolutely sure? What else is there that belongs only to us?—

— Well now there's a third person.—

— Oh never. To him it's like anything else that's used. Once the purpose is served, it's over. You know. He's forgotten already. It's only to us. for him, there are other things on his mind. He's quite extraordinary. what he's brought off. in and out, here, several times.—

— Don't tell me. And forget whatever that is, yourself. I don't know how successful he was. Whether he was ever followed, whether they played the old game of letting him lead them to his contacts, including this cottage. How do I know? I couldn't watch the place all the time. and he was so cocky and relaxed, didn't give a damn, never said anything. And that telephone was frustrating. I couldn't tell you, ask you anything about the fellow. He could have been picked up and I along with him, and you wouldn't have known.—

She was considering, a moment, whether this was a reproach. But between them, that wasn't possible; you don't live for each other, the loving is contained within the cause, and there would be no love if you were to refuse, because of personal risk, something expected of you by the struggle. She didn't know how to phrase this; did not have to because he was speaking again. — I hope you investigated him thoroughly before you let him use us. You know that, with me, it's not only myself— there's always the risk of the movement being infiltrated through me; any one of us.—

— My dear love, don't you trust me?—

— I've told you before what you are for me.—