Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

The little girl is proud of being the girl-friend of someone in our family. I know she tells everybody I'm the famous Sonny's son; her parents 'trust me' with her because they are impressed by the high moral standards of a family who live for others; frightened to death to participate in liberation politics themselves, they belong to the people who see 'Sonny' as a kind of hero and I suppose always will; although I notice lately that among his peers he seems to count for less than he used to. The big shots in the movement don't come round for private talks so often. I have the impression he's being eased aside; don't know why, and he wouldn't talk to me about it anyway. He's selective; it's not the sort of secret it suits him to share with me. I suppose in politics as with everything else: you have your day, and then it's over, someone else's turn. And that, again, isn't something he's good at accepting.

I can see my mother's pleased about the little girl. I wouldn't sleep with her in our house even when there's the opportunity, my mother in Lusaka and he in bed on the floor in that love-nest, but I've brought her home for tea. I knew my mother would like that; it's the way things used to be, ought to be, for her. And she was quite like she used to be, before; she had put on stockings and high-heeled shoes. — Oh your mum's beautiful— My girl was enchanted.

— Was. When she still had her long hair.—

The two females at once reached some unspoken accord. The little girl instinctively knows my mother would like to see me — at least one of her children—'settled' with a conventional domestic life, nearby. And hang liberation, eh. Live in the interstices that were once good enough for her and her husband, when they were young; and these are wider, more comfortable, now, no more Benoni-son-of-sorrow ghetto, but illegal occupation of a house in a white area, cinemas open to all. Good enough for me, the stay-at-home, the disappointment (to him) and the mama's boy (to her). She, too, has a role for me: tame Will keeps the home fires burning while noble Sonny and Baby defend the freedom of the people.

I said to her when I brought the results of my first-year studies — distinctions all the way — What am I doing this for? Who's going to employ a business-school graduate in a revolution? — And I laughed. So she took it as a joke. — It's wonderful you've done so well, Will.—

— Oh yes, my father will be proud of me.—

She was looking at me, unguarded for a second, her eyes then quickly lowered, a faint twitch in the left lid. I shouldn't have said it; it was the nearest we've ever come — to what? Betraying him? I don't know what sense there is in this compact, but I see she still wants it observed although the consolation of the grandchild, the visits to Baby — a kind of life of her own— have somehow brought her to terms with what she must feel about her husband.

But I was serious; fed up. — Why should I go on living here as if it's all right to make a nice little corner for yourself— (I didn't say 'with a nice little girl'.)

She was watching my lips as if she couldn't believe what came from them. Her alarm made her shrink and age, just as pleasure at the tea-party with a prospective daughter-in-law had made her soften youthfully. — We're going to need qualified people. Bush fighters won't win the economic war.—

Where does my mother get that kind of jargon? From him, no doubt; or picked up along with the baby-talk in homely visits to Lusaka. It's not her turn of phrase. She and I don't communicate like that.

— You're valuable, Will.—

I know what she's saying: don't leave. Don't leave me. Don't leave us. She won't let me fight. For my people. For my freedom.

I've never thought there was any guile in my mother but I suppose she's a woman, after all, some sort of sister to my father's blonde, since he's fancied them both. And circumstances have brought out the ability in her, as she's been changed in other ways. Perhaps to show me how she depends on me she's taken lately to asking me to drive her around (I've traded in that bike and bought a 'nice little' Japanese car secondhand because the girl's parents wouldn't let her ride clinging to my back). She's going to meet a friend or one of the doctor's patients has invited her to visit — as I remarked, she's become more independent of my father, in her simple way. I drop her at a shopping centre or a street corner convenient for me to turn back. She says she's only a step or two away from her destination, it's not worthwhile to go right up to the entrance. So she doesn't press the dependency too far; it's carefully calculated. She doesn't need me to come and fetch her home again — there's a bus, or the friend will drive her, she assures. Poor woman, I've got the message. Once when my way was blocked by a truck just as I was about to turn the corner, unobserved I saw her walking not up the street on the side she'd said she was going, but round the opposite corner in a different direction. She might have mistaken the address; but it also crossed my mind that the whole outing was a pathetic lie, she had no friend, no planned visit, she just wanted to show me she cannot live with him, without me.

Not all the perfumes of Arabia. Why him?

The question came back again and again, acid burning in Sonny's breast. It was not quite the same question. New, different, now. Not as if he were to have been the only one. Several comrades were visited that night, or some other night. He knew, because he and they had compared notes privately before taking the matter to the executive. But the suspicion, that had had to be dispelled by a show of leadership, had been set in circulation against him, alone. Why him? Why should it find substance, some confirmation in comrades' minds? There was no suggestion that this could take place in relation to the others who had been approached by the disaffected. Unreliable. What shadow had been cast, from where? Behind him, around him; all turned in his mind and burned in that place under his breast-bone. Not even Hannah's soft padded hand on him could still it.

Hannah. They knew about Hannah. They knew what had been going on a long time, now, since prison — they were men, some of them lovers of women — which means they took their chances when these presented themselves. But he was not a lover of women, in that accepted sense — a weekend or a night when a woman looks at you in a certain way in another city, and you come home and forget about her. Revolutionaries, activists, are whole men and women; only human. Such marginal encounters have nothing to do with dedication and dependability.

But Sonny never had been that kind of man. There were no flattering flirtations or one-night peccadillos of manhood to ignore, in his record. He lived in intricate balance an apparently permanent double life. Seriously; he managed it and evidently would not relinquish it. They knew what a good wife for a revolutionary Aila was. And they all knew who the woman was. Useful. She was not afraid of police and prisons, danger by association. One of themselves, in a way. But only in a way; not directly in the movement, certainly not acceptable as party to deliberations, decisions and tactics, and therefore not — most important — subject to discipline. He knew that. Sonny, who had been the most disciplined of men, knew that about her, however close he allowed her to come. And to come close to him was to come close to the movement. He knew he was responsible for that; and of course he was aware they knew it.

He began to discern a shadow cast from Hannah. His needing Hannah. He had not told his peers — who had shown their confidence vested in him — about the man he had found sleeping on her stoep, the man she sent with an intimate password he couldn't refuse to acknowledge, whom he fed and guarded— yes! — not knowing who he was or what he was doing, some piece of adventurism, probably, Hannah had been deceived into.