Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

To change the world. Trumpeting words again.

He leant over and emptied the full ashtray into the garden. — That's enough. No more.—

She pushed the cigarette pack away. — I promise. Not while you're here. — After a pause: —.So it's all right. Somehow. Everything's the same again.—

— Not the same. — He tried to answer her smile but his was a strange grin that stayed and stayed with him under the contradiction of those dark thick brows bunched over blackly intense eyes.

— Can you eat with me?—

He couldn't, he'd promised to let Aila have the car that evening — some invitation he'd managed to get out of, pleading paper-work to be done. So he left soon, and that was his second homecoming. Aila didn't expect any report from him, thank god. He was late — but she was accustomed to that. She took the car keys without reproach and hurried off, smelling of perfume. The boy was out, he'd found a girl at last. Sonny could go to bed in blankness, if not peace.

Hannah did not know her lover was a grandfather — and if only he had realized this, nothing would have changed if she had: with his wife and grown son and daughter the news would have belonged to that dimension of his personality which, without her having any place in it, enriched her share. From the first, when she saw him in prison and visited his home, she was fascinated by the complete context of Sonny, half in love with his family as with his political associates.

There was something she hadn't told him, either. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees wanted her to take on a high-level post. She hadn't applied for it — she wouldn't have thought of changing jobs while she was fortunate enough to have one that kept her where he was. One of the observers from the International Commission of Jurists who had made her acquaintance in knots of discussion at Sonny's and other trials, apparently had recommended she be approached. She was gratified at this unexpected estimation of her, surprised and slightly alarmed. It stirred her like a new sense experienced, the touch of something other than a lover. She enjoyed the esteem of the offer as if that were the beginning and end of it; did not think of it as a decision to be made — she was far from even considering that. But she felt this was not a time to tell Sonny anything; anything unexpected. He had just dealt with a conflict he could not have imagined ever would happen. It was not the moment to present him with anything but herself just as she had existed for him since she visited him in prison. Not even the pleasure, as she thought of it, of something to be proud of, in her. Sonny was her farthest horizon. It would take some other sort of courage, one she didn't think she had, to hoist herself up past unease at the prospect; see that, from there, it was no jump off the edge of the world.

Twice lately while I've been alone in the house the phone has rung and when I've answered whoever was on the other end of the line has hung up. I wonder if he's going to be arrested again: Security checking to find out if he's living at home. I supposed I'd better warn him; but he gave a sceptical smile— Don't worry son. He doesn't come home so often with that current of — what was it exactly — vigour, excitement, shamelessly, hardly hidden from us when he's been with her, his lips full and that curly black hair combed back to make innocent the tousling in bed he's just left; nor with something of the same fast-flowing blood we used to sense in him for different reasons, when he'd been making one of his speeches and defying the cops. Maybe he and his woman have had a row. Perhaps she's the one who calls, hoping he's alone in the house and he'll answer. But I'm the man who's likely to be around at home in my room because I've begun a project — call it that — that needs solitude. I've found a use for the state, compromised and deserted, he dumped me in when he walked off so calmly with his blonde after an afternoon at the cinema.

Then last week there were two more calls, and this time, after a humming silence (could have meant long distance) someone asked to speak to my mother. A man. What he said was not her name but 'the lady of the house'. The second time — I was irritated at the interruption of my train of thought — I asked if this was a sales pitch, direct marketing (a subject in the curriculum of my business-school courses). The voice said no, apologized politely, but hung up when I thought I'd better be polite, too, and asked if I could take a message. No! It's not possible that now my mother as well — my mother has a lover somewhere. But I find myself snickering, first with embarrassment and then because it's so funny — the joke's on me, and now I can laugh out loud at myself. The clown really is capering for once. Our family in a completely different scenario: one of the sitcoms our State television stations buy from America, where every member of the family is cheating on the other, straight-faced. My mother and I sometimes watch them in the kitchen while she's cooking dinner — it hurts him, after the Shakespeare he used to privilege us with, to see us giggling at such stuff.

My poor mother with her ugly shorn head and her brave show of having a life of her own, knitting baby clothes and trying to make new friends among her employer's patients. I'm old enough, now, almost to wish it were true. I understand the reassurance to be found in a stranger to whom one is something, someone, outside the triangle — father, mother, son; Sonny, Aila, Will — of this house.

A congress had not been called for two years because of Government restrictions on the movement. When this one was held clandestinely the executive council was dissolved as it had been pointed out it would be.

Then the old executive was re-elected en bloc, to applause. The two who had belonged to the cabal of the disaffected had not been phased out; they were there in their seats, the one acknowledging, as his due of honour, the spatter of clapping, the other with mouth drawn down modestly and eyes lowered. This must have been condoned by the leadership, Sonny's peers, because there are ways of preventing these things — blocking candidature with authoritatively-lobbied support for other nominees. Even democratic movements must work like this, for the ends of the struggle. Sonny had been in liberation politics long enough to have been involved in such means himself a number of times.

So those night visitors had been disciplined, brought into line — and obtained their price in the bargain. He had heard nothing further about it. There they sat, his comrades like any others. Just as before. But when the executive council elected among themselves their office bearers, Sonny did not retain his key position. That was arranged, too; he saw this in the eyes of the leader who had taken him by the elbow and said, It's the way to deal with it, Sonny: a look with the disguise of a slightly cocked head so that the blow would be a glancing one, a quick signal of the eyes that Sonny should step down before a stronger nomination — for the good of the struggle. There could be no question in Sonny's mind that his peers, his comrades-in-arms, would not put the struggle above any and all other considerations. Like himself. In spite of what had happened. Therefore there must be good reason; they must be right in giving him some high-sounding but minor responsibility in place of the ones he had fulfilled — unsparingly. His life belonged to them. What had he kept back of it — abandoned a career he loved, given up the forming of minds of a future generation for the bubble reputation (curse learning by rote) of a popular platform demagogue, left the cosy circle of family for the existence under surveillance, the prison cell; broken up — yes, and gladly, for the struggle he'd do it again — the entire containing structure of his emotions so that he was defenceless, anyone could enter him, anyone take up possession there. If he was responsible to the struggle, then the struggle was responsible for him, Sonny become 'Sonny'. He had no existence without it.