Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

They looked at each other searchingly, awkward. Both, each for their own reasons, were tempted to go back where the scent of orange blossom had been a heady oxygen.

She made it possible with a rational evasion that would not recognize there was an emotional reason of another kind which might make him shudder at returning to that place. — It's nearby. — As if the long drives they had taken were not a particular intimate way of being together, travelling in a contained space, neither here nor there where other ties existed.

So Sonny told the necessary lies. To Aila, who could not have imagined he would lie to her. To his comrades, who seldom had urgent need of him, now, and were unlikely to try to contact him at home. Aila reassured him that Will would lend her his car for her weekend plans. He took the briefcase and left. She had kissed him on the cheek; he put his hand to the place as to a nick made when shaving, while he drove to pick up Hannah.

A gust of gaiety overcame Sonny and Hannah on the drive. Theirs was a splendid day with the sheen of last night's rain on the veld grass and the great glossy caves of wild mahogany trees the road dipped under as they descended to a sub-tropical altitude. She fed him dried apricots and once he pretended to give her fingers a nip. He was reminded, passing a railway siding, that once he took a bunch of kids camping in this area. — Tell me. — The old desire to have known the conscientious schoolmaster surfaced, only too ready to come to life in her. — What a disaster. There was a washaway, I herded them together at this siding hoping to get them onto a train. We stood there for hours in torrential rain and when a train came it was for whites and the driver wouldn't let us on. — He laughed at the vision of himself. — The kids were wet as seals. They took it as a great adventure.—

— Well, at least that wouldn't happen now.—

No, the trains on this route were no longer segregated, and there was no law, any longer, against a man of his kind and a woman of her kind sharing a bed. The woman at the reception desk had been trained to make guests feel welcomed with a personal touch. — Weren't you with us here before, sir?—

He was signing the register with her grandfather's surname, their pseudonym as a couple. — No.—

— Funny… but so many people come back to us again and again…—

Yes, no law against such a couple, now, but by tradition the combination continues to be something of a shock, even if it has to be dismissed for business reasons.

— No— He was aware of Hannah's eyes on his back as he wrote the date in the register; he felt shame (and the wrongness of feeling shame, as if it somehow could be read as an apology for being himself) on behalf of both of them for this lie. Only this lie.

She wanted to tell him to ask for the bungalow they had before but couldn't in view of the denial they had ever been there. The one they were allotted was much the same; she drew back the curtains and flung open the windows to let out the smell of insect repellent. — It's that stuff that made you wheeze in the middle of the night. — He did not let the opportunity of the reference slip. — It was all right. We got up and went for a walk just as we were, the stars were already low and it was so lovely and cool. — What was he going to get her to say: I love you Sonny, I love you so much — but she's like Aila, now, she can't say it. He lay on the bed and closed one eye, his signal that he would take a nap. — Come on. Don't be lazy. Come and swim with me. — They butted and raced each other under water, and it was impossible not to laugh. Later they lay on the bed companionably with the heat of the afternoon shut out, he reading and she with the headphones of her miniature cassette player (your diadem, he called it) buried in her hair tarnished by wet and springing back like grapevine tendrils dried round his absently twirling fingers. Every now and then, without speaking, she would suddenly take off the headphones and put one to his ear, closing her eyes and tightening her soft mouth in ravishment at what she had been listening to. — What is it? Concerto for mandolins, Vivaldi. Raindrop music, that slow movement. — She snuggled back into her headphones. But when he laid open on his chest the file of papers, notes and speeches he was reading and she saw he wanted to talk she dropped the headphones like a necklace beneath her chin.

— It worries me more and more. — The back of his hand fell on the dossier. — These young people seem to grind on, doctrinaire in the old style, the old catchwords, while the socialist world — our model — the real socialist world, it's changed so much. People there have fought and died to get rid of most of the means the young comrades are still starry-eyed about using after liberation. We have the principle we must be led by the people. right, and it's the masses in Eastern Europe who've overthrown the regimes that were supposed to be led by them!

It's the people's choice and will! How can we not recognize that? Not trust them? Do we really want to 'achieve' policies these uprisings prove to have perpetuated misery and poverty? When those who've lived with them are making them obsolete?—

— You're talking about the unemployed, the camp-follow-ers — the school-boycott generation, going on at gatherings.? And you owe them so much they must be given the platform. Well, and yes, it's true, there're also a few whites, the fossilized Stalinists—

— No, no. Even among us. the needle jumps back and you hear the same record. And of course it's still what works best with crowds. We're not innocent of using it. particularly with the youth and the workers. It's still what seems to them the answer to their frustrations. The secular promised land. What they want to hear. So. And there're still fellows here who, when they're talking about giving the land back to the people, mean some kind of forced collectives. It doesn't matter to them that these have been abandoned everywhere because they don't work — people don't work productively in that structure. It's been proved over seventy hard years! Doesn't that mean anything? And the others, shaking their heads because the Constitutional Guidelines update the Freedom Charter— we've moved on, thirty-five years since Freedom Square, for god's sake — but they sneer sell-out because there's recognition of private property along with land redistribution, a mixed economy with nationalization. So they're outraged that anyone should be allowed to own a family home. Still dreaming our people's democracy will be able through god knows what miracle — you tell me! — to provide state garden suburbs for the workers, when no other regime has succeeded in this, not one, when it's been the great failure of socialism we ought to have the confidence to admit if we want to live as socialists of the twenty-first century.

Because that's what we already should be. The twentieth's thinking is the past. Finished. Viva, viva socialism. Which one? Which one are we shouting about? The dead one? We'll take the best of it and move on. Must. Don't they see, won't they see? The Soviets, the whole of Eastern Europe, even China— there's a new assessment — yes, that's what comes out of the uprisings, isn't it, Hannah, that's what it really is, quite scientific enough, on the analysis of concrete evidence! — it's a whole new understanding of our human needs and how to go about trying to realize them. And it's not what the capitalist world rubs its hands over, it's not what they think; we're not being taken over. It's not revisionism — but here you get that old parrot accusation.—

She stirred beside him. — Change the way they think. again. I don't know. It's not so long since you learnt to change the idea you had of yourselves as powerless against whites. The old Left did it, by god! Thank god. Only the old Left. Now new realities to be accepted. It's going to be hard for many, looked at from here. It means the loss of absolutes— you know what I mean? I'm a missionary's granddaughter. It makes people feel insecure. You can screw up the courage to do what you have to do to get rid of the old structures that hold you down if you can believe there's a paradise on the other side. You die for freedom only if there's the political equivalent of eternal life to come — which is liberation as promised in the old socialist writ, not in some compromise with a mixed economy, people with money — whites, and bourgeois blacks! — still owning property on land the whites stole by conquest! That's how it will seem!—