Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

She hid her face against him, muffling her voice. — 'You are the only friend I've ever had.'—

He pulled her head away, distorting between his long hands her soft pastel cheeks in pressure against the brilliant blue chips of her eyes, and kissed eyes, nose, mouth as if to efface her. They made love again, the kind of love-making that brings the dependent fear that one could never live, again, without it.

When they were lying quiet, she made her usual principled acknowledgement of the limit of her claim. — How are things at home? Is Aila back yet?—

— She arrived a few days ago. Will behaved quite reasonably with me. even cooked some meals.—

She squeezed his hand. — Of course, he's a good boy, he's just like you, underneath. You'll see how he'll turn out.—

She might have been a wife, reassuring him about his children. What games are played, between lovers! — My daughter's married, you may be surprised to hear. I was.—

Hannah laughed. — No, not surprised at all. She's a very attractive girl. Not as beautiful as her mother, but still lovely. Who's she married? Someone in Lusaka, of course?—

— But like the rest of us, originally from the ghettos. I've never met him. Aila likes him. So I hope it's not a big mistake.—

— Why should it be a mistake?—

— Marriage, these days. In their circumstances, the instability, exile, no home — what for? Marriage implies certain social structures, and we're busy breaking up the existing ones, we have to, it's the task of our time, our children's time. I don't know why she wants it; she's got a head on her, young as she is. At least I thought she had.—

— You think they should just live together?—

They look at each other: like Baby's father and his lover.

— Yes, while they can. There'll be long separations, each will have to go where they're sent. Marriage is for one place, one way of life. It's a mistake for them. Live together while you can, as long as it's possible, and then, well—

— Aila surely wouldn't want that. Isn't she pleased?—

He put his hands up over his face a moment and breathed out through his fingers. — She's pleased.—

He did not continue with what he was about to say; he did not tell Hannah his daughter was going to have a child.

I wonder how she feels making love with a grandfather. That didn't stop him either. I wonder how he could go on doing it knowing he was so old — what's it? Over fifty — and some other man was also doing the same thing to his darling daughter.

Fucking his pudding-faced blonde (pink blancmange like my mother used to make for us out of a packet when we were kids) while he ought to be dandling his grandchild on his knee. It's disgusting to think like this about him, I know, but he's the one who's brought it about. That's the educational opportunity the progressive schoolteacher arranged for me.

I should have thought — I did think, when my mother told me about my sister's baby — that, at last, would have been the end of it, for him. Even if he hadn't stopped when my sister tried to kill herself because of him, his old obsession with self-respect might have stopped him now. A grandfather, the great lover! My father, who has never looked ridiculous in his whole life. If not his famous self-respect, then self-esteem, vanity, I should have thought — I notice in the bathroom in the mornings he has quite a paunch, there's grey in his chest-hair. When he yawns, his breath is bad. He must have some dignity left, after all.

But no. Everything goes on as it has for — how long is it already? I keep thinking of it as an interlude, something that will be over; but it's our life. When I'm his age and I look back on my youth, that's what it will be.

Of course he's never seen the baby boy. Only the photographs my mother brings back. She tells him the infant looks like him, just as I did when I was born, she says. It already has quite marked eyebrows. But he says babies look like other babies. The lover wants to acknowledge no paternity, neither for me nor his grandchild; unfortunate about the eyebrows. and my mother so innocently proud of the proof of succession, something no other woman of his can take away from her. Maybe it's not so much innocence: perhaps women really want men only to supply them with children; when that biological function has been fulfilled down to the second generation, and they themselves can't bear children any more (my mother must be close to that stage now? Like Baby, I always think of her as young) they don't need us. I realize I don't know enough about women. It's not a subject of instruction he's keen to pass on.

My mother goes to visit Baby and the little boy in Lusaka often. Of course — she said 'I need to be able to go back'. Before the birth she was busy knitting and sewing while he was out at his meetings and 'meetings' in the evenings. She pinned the shapes of small garments to the padded ironing board and pressed them under a damp cloth; the smell of warm wool steamed up. Sometimes I was studying in the kitchen to keep her company. There was no-one to collect the pins with the horseshoe magnet.

She went to Lusaka once more before the child was born, and again for the birth. She has no trouble with the authorities; why should they harass the poor woman: they did search her luggage at Jan Smuts airport on that third exit — she was, after all, Sonny's wife — and how foolish they must have felt to have their counter strewn with her beautifully-made baby clothes, emblems of embroidered rabbits instead of subversive documents, white and blue ribbons in place of the colours of a banned political organization. She said they were very nice to her; congratulated her on being about to become an ouma. My father remarked, yes, sentimentality is the obverse side of thuggery. He knows that from his prison days. The doctor for whom my mother works is most understanding and accommodating — he doesn't seem to object to her taking frequent absences from the surgery. I suppose it must be unpaid leave; but my mother is used to managing with little money, she doesn't skimp us, in the household, and yet apparently she is able to save enough for the airfares. I suppose that's why she doesn't look like she used to — it's not only that hair, now — she doesn't dress with the care she did, goes off on these trips to my sister in pants and flat shoes, the clothes and toys for the little boy stuffed into my duffel bag. When she comes back she doesn't ask how we— I've managed. And she seems to have made more friends here; friends of her own, not my father's with whom she was always on the fringe. She's quite often out when I arrive home and her day's work at the surgery is over. The other evening, he came in and I heard him call out from the kitchen as he hasn't done for I don't know how long: Aila? Aila?

But he was mistaken; he's lost the instinct for sensing my mother's presence in some other room. They were empty. She was not there. Not for him, not for me.

As Sonny believed he had found in Hannah the only friend he ever had, so he had believed he had found in the risks of liberation, on public platforms and at clandestine meetings, in prison, the only comrades he had ever had. If that friendship meant for him the blessed reception of sensuality as part of intelligence, then that comradeship meant he and his colleagues in common faith would live or die together. They did not speak each other's names under interrogation. Since they had been equal to that, no other form of betrayal could find a crack to enter between them.

Once a great Shakespearean reader, reverent amateur of the power of words, Sonny must have known that if a term is coined it creates a self-fulfilling possibility and at the same time provides a formulation for dealing with it. 'Disaffected' was coined in political jargon to handle, with prophylactic gloves, the kind of men who came to see him one night when he was alone in the house. He turned them away; as he was certain others would. They were best left to fizzle out through lack of notice taken of them; the acknowledgement of any kind of 'disaffection' in the movement was merely a means of letting the government smell blood. Individuals discussed such visits in confidence, they were known about; the subject was not on the agenda of the executive. But several of those night visitors sat blandly on that executive. Perhaps they were awaiting a more propitious time to act again, rather than affirming contrite submission, a lapse — just once— accepted by the leadership as such. These options in themselves caused conflict. Some thought the men ought to be talked to, privately, by strong personalities; they needed to be dealt with, have it made clear to them, once again, that unity and no other was the condition of resistance — with the underlying message that they didn't stand a chance of getting away with anything they had in mind. Some felt this must be managed with the greatest care, they mustn't feel in danger of expulsion anyway— it would encourage them to pre-empt and make a face-saving announcement of a split. And of course the disaffected cabal scented the sweat of this indecision and moved to take advantage of it. They lobbied (that inappropriate term for a movement that came into being because its entire great constituency was excluded from parliament) among the other executive members where they saw concern for caution might become support. There were leaks interpreted by the press: LEADERSHIP'S BREAKING BRANCH — THE OLD GUARD HANGS ON.