Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

— I've just left it. I haven't even replied. they've written again. By courier.—

— Of course. They want you. Highly recommended.—

— Lie down, I can't talk to your back. please.—

He sank beside her. They were stretched out like two figures on a tomb commemorating a faithful life together. She took his hand. — I don't know what to say to them. I mean, what can I do. I'm. I've got my work here—

— They know about that, don't they. They know how good at that kind of thing you are; that's why. They know you're capable of something. more. bigger. important.—

— Nothing's more important than what's happening here. For me.—

— You don't know what to say to them.—

— No. I don't. I just don't know.—

—You've thought about it.—

— Yes, in a way. I haven't really. it doesn't seem to be something I can take in—

— But you've thought about it.—

— What it would mean — yes. — He had drawn it out of her, he was making her face what she had not, did not want to.

She could not turn to him the fatuous, what do you think?

She got out of bed and padded barefoot into the kitchen, the familiar sight of the Van Gogh sunflowers, to make some coffee. She supposed he would have to go, soon; he always had to go. She did not return to the room while the water was boiling; she left him alone there, god knows what he was thinking — but she knew what it was he was thinking, she did not want to see it. She picked the dead leaves off the pot of orégano growing on the windowsill. There was the whoosh of the lavatory cistern releasing its content; he had used the bathroom, and she found this reassuring — life going on humbly with its small demands of the body.

She brought in two mugs of coffee. He was back in the bed. — I wish they'd never asked me.—

I was the one to open the door again.

I actually heard them before they hammered on it. I woke and knew immediately what was coming with the screech of the gate and the tramping up the concrete path he laid for my mother so we wouldn't trail mud onto the stoep. It's as if there's a setting in my brain like a wake-up call programmed on a radio clock.

I got up and without even turning on the light went down the passage and unlocked the door with a flourish.

— He's not here.—

Within three silhouettes I made out a pale blur and two dark blanks — a white officer, and the others our kind. One of them shone his torch at my face: —Dis net die seun, man. —

— You want to come and search? My father's not here. I don't know where he is, so no good asking.—

One of them pressed the switch of the stoep light, the darkness whisked from them — the officer in uniform and the other two in their kind of drag, dressed in jeans and split running shoes to look like disco-goers instead of fuzz. The white was young but had false teeth, I saw when he smiled at my cockiness to show he was used to the lack of respectful fear you can expect from the families of men like my father. He spoke in Afrikaans. — But you know where your mother is, hey — go and call your mother.—

And he spelled out the full name, maiden and married. My heart began to thunder up a troop of wild beasts in my chest. — She doesn't know, either.—

The white repeated my mother's names.

I had to believe they didn't believe me, they wanted her only to question her about him, the galloping confusion under my ribs let loose childish impulses to shut the door against them, to yell to her, help me, save me. Me? Him? They had not come for Sonny, they came for her. At my back I heard her approaching from her bedroom and I could see her before I saw her, the flowered dressing-gown with her shiny black plait down her back.

She pushed gently past me as she really is. A short towelling gown and a rough cap of chemically-dulled hair, two stoic lines from nose to mouth that have changed her smile. She answered to her names, the one she had from her family before she married him and the one she took on with everything else that has come from him. I began to shout and she shushed me, pressing my shoulder and signalling her hand towards her mouth as if I could understand only gestures in which I suppose she had communicated with me long before I could understand speech. I followed her back to the entrance hall where — my god, what was she doing, she was taking out of our junk cupboard the carryall she used to keep packed for my father, she took it into the bedroom and started putting her hand-cream hairbrush Kleenex — I shouted, at last, at last: The bastard! That bastard, what has he done now! What has he done to get you inside! I'll kill him, I tell you when he walks in that kitchen door again I'll kill him!

She was moving her head, moving her head calmingly at me as she packed her bag, you'd have thought she was about to go on a trip to see Baby and the grandchild. She turned towards me, pleading, modest. — Will. I have to get dressed.—

God knows what they are going to do to her; but a son cannot look upon his mother's nakedness.

When they had taken her away I thrust myself into a pair of pants and ran from the house that streamed light and drove the fastest I could get out of a beat-up second-hand car to that cottage. The dogs from the main house followed me bounding and snarling across the grass and I tore at shrubs and threw branches at them. I was barefoot and they snapped at my calves as I raced to the steps. Now it's my turn to hammer. I flung back the broken screen door and beat upon the wooden one with both fists. I didn't call on my father; Sonny, I bellowed, Sonny. Sonny. Sonny. Sonny. There was no-one there. I went on beating at the door and was disgusted to find my fists, my face wet. For the second time, first as a youth with a breaking voice, now as a man, I wept.

Lights went on in the main house and there were voices above the howling and barking frenzy of the dogs. I ran shit-scared through the thickest and darkest part of the garden, gleam of a fish-pond, a black intruder pursued by a property owner, tried the fence, fell back, made it a second time and as my head must have become visible against the sky, a bullet cracked past me.

I went to kill him that night.

I was the one who opened the door to her jailers. I was the one who could have died.

It was the weekend of reconciliation.

Sonny and his blonde woman went back to the resort ron-davel among the orange blossom. To be away somewhere, once more, to have whole nights together; it was a pause clutched at out of what was pressing them along, breaking in upon them in the timelessness of that one room. Hannah's idea — Hannah's plan; once she sensed he knew she would be the United Nations High Commission's Regional Representative on the vast continent of Africa everything became insidious between them, guilt and fear and regret taught her guile to save her skin from the corrosion of his pain: she could not go, she could not; while she knew she would. She wheedled him into finding a pretext to be away from home for two days. Urgent meetings at national level in some other part of the country? He had somehow always managed to arrange these trips so that his family believed he was with his comrades, and his comrades believed he had some unavoidable domestic obligation meriting a weekend to himself. They had always got away with it. And while she spoke this vulgar phrase she heard in her own ears the cynical deception of any common sexual encounter; not for them. And the 'always' could be construed to refer obliquely to the fact that lately— unlike 'always'—it could not be taken for granted he would be included in important discussions 'at national level'.

Where should they go?

— Rustenburg?—

She suggested this as if at the same time quickly abandoning the possibility. It was where they had experienced their most intense happiness together; but it was also the place from which he had come home to find his daughter had tried to kill herself.