Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

And this was being done to him within the purplish brick walls, on the red cement floors, under the tin roof crackling expansion in the heat, of some religious seminary in the veld; exactly the odour and feel of education-department buildings where the schoolteacher had taken petty orders from inspectors and been given his official dismissal for marching children out of the humble and submissive place in society alloted them and him under the sign CARPE DIEM.

There was no complaint to be made by Sonny. It was a principle, application of which to some other comrade he himself had approved whenever it was appropriate, that personality cults should be avoided. If a post is to be well filled, it does not matter who fills it; change is good, the movement must be always in growth, no-one should be in the same position too long. New blood must come from the young cadres. He had used this ready jargon himself. He understood, too — although this did not enable him ever to close the one-man tribunal sitting in his mind— that he would never really know why the wind in his political sails slackened. He could only go on imagining answers that were given behind his back. And these could materialize only out of suspicions he found it possible to have about himself. Things that were forgotten or suppressed, dismissed by him when he was borne and buffeted exhilaratingly at the centre of the movement. He thought of all the criticisms he had made or agreed with, about others. The word goes round that Sonny is too intellectual. Sonny thinks too much. Sonny asks too many questions. Sonny's style of oratory is getting too predictable… out of date. Sonny's not a coward, no, no-one could ever say he wouldn't risk his own life, but… Sonny has attachments, attachments don't go with revolution, he's said so himself. Sonny's position on violence isn't quite in accordance with policy. And do you remember, that time. the business of the cabal. And that other time, before, the cleansing of the graves. his big speech, and then.

When he confronted the only individuals he could, his closest comrades, if they knew the answers they didn't tell him. Not the truth; so that must mean the truth would destroy closeness, he would never forgive them. — That's how it goes, Sonny, a damned shame… some people (a shake of the head), aie! you can't trust them, they're too ambitious and you're too straight… you know what I mean? You don't manoeuvre, it's not your nature, man. You today, me tomorrow — who knows what will happen. we just have to hang in there, for the struggle.—

When he confronted Hannah, together with whom, since the first discovery of this possibility between them, every political question had been analysed, she wasn't able to employ the faculty — not this time, not for this. All she could do was comfort him, touch him and enfold him, her soft thighs clamped heavily over his body, her arms tight round his neck, hands thrust into his hair, as if she were gathering him up and putting him together again. In time he grew ashamed of this cosseting, he was her lover, not some victim to be succoured. He made it clear that this did not accord with the discipline of activists; he did so by no longer speaking of what had happened, put it behind him like any stage in the struggle they had dealt with, and continued with good grace to do the work in the movement now allotted to him. He took her in his arms as her man, needing no consolation; and so, unsought, it secretly came to him. He could not resist it, although it was not what he wanted. What he wanted, from her, was what no-one could give him back; his trust in himself.

When she caught sight of herself in the steamy bathroom mirror, she saw the United Nations High Commission for Refugees Regional Representative for Africa there in the familiar pudgy face. (She could not stop smoking, even to please him, because she would get fat.) Hannah never had liked her own face. She had no vanity; and this was one of the qualities, conversely, that attracted Sonny to her. An unsought reward. She would have agreed with Sonny's Will that her kind of looks were too pink-fleshy — though his comparison with the animal by whose name he reviled her to himself certainly would have hurt her cruelly. Particularly coming from him.

She saw the Regional Representative for refugees so often there that she had to tell Sonny. She would have to tell him, anyway, now. The High Commission wanted an answer.

She did not know whether to tell him before love-making or after. Each time she heard his step coming over the cracked cement of the cottage stoep she was taken by an agitation of indecision, moving restlessly about their one room to escape the necessity. It seemed to Hannah a terribly important difference: before or after. A matter of honesty, precious between them. They had never seduced one another. What were known as feminine wiles and male deceptions were denials of equality, an ethic of the wide struggle for human freedom they belonged to. If she brought up the subject after they'd made love, it could seem calculated to catch him in a mood of tenderness, shorn like Samson, not fit to put up resistance. If she told him before, then the love-making (their compact made in the flesh) would seem an attempt to divert him from something on which it was his right to make her concentrate. Yet it was in the end in her disarmed state, love casting out fear or the tranquillizing drug of sex blurring judgment, that she told him. She had put out her hand to feel for the cigarette pack on the floor and he drew his arm from under her head to stop the hand. She smiled with her eyes still shut and curled the hand into the damp nest of hair in his armpit instead. He gave her the childhood kiss on the forehead. She loved him so much she could have told him anything: we're going to die, you'll go to prison again one day, I'm going away — no consequence of words spoken existed.

— An extraordinary thing. I've been offered a job.—

He answered sleepily. — That Council of Churches one? You can certainly get it if you want it.—

— No. It's really something I can hardly believe—

There was a faint encouraging pressure, his arm and chest against the hollow where her hand was held.

— United Nations. The High Commission for Refugees. — And then it all came from her: —They've actually offered me a post at the level of director — that's just one below the Assistant Secretary General.—

He seemed not to want to move, not to wake fully.

She thought for a moment he would fall asleep again and not remember what she had said. Let him sleep, let him be asleep.

— When did you hear this?—

— A little while ago. I didn't take it seriously.—

— What kind of position. Where.—

— Well, the actual title's the High Commission's Regional Representative for Africa. Based in Addis Ababa. But working all over, of course.—

— Yes, it's a vast continent, Hannah. and many wars.—

Sonny disentangled himself gently from her and sat up. — How did all this come about? How do they know about you?—

— Apparently a recommendation from the International Commission of Jurists. I had no idea.—

He nodded slowly; he was rubbing his naked arms, crossed over against himself. — Addis. Eritrea, Sudan, Lebanon. God knows where, there are new camps every day, new populations wandering homeless.—

— Mozambique. — She added somewhere nearer by, within reach of him.

He turned and gazed down at her. She kept quite still in her shelter of blonde hair, a straggling wisp sweaty from love-making streaking one cheek. But Sonny only smiled, the smile that lingered and turned into that painful grin of his he couldn't relax. — A wonderful opportunity, my Hannah. An honour to be chosen.—

— Offered.—

— No; chosen.—