Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

— But the writ's being rewritten! That's the point! People have been willing to die now for that. We've got to wake up and realize it, if it's to mean feeding and housing and educating our people in freedom! Giving the generations of uprooted people and refugees somewhere to live instead of somewhere to run from— There.

The reference lay between them like the name of the recently dead brought up tactlessly before the bereaved. I could have cut my tongue out, the offender says, not meaning it, because reference to the loss is something those concerned will have to accustom themselves to, anyway.

Hannah broke in quickly. — Is this being taken up with the cadres?—

— Not as it should be. No. There's no interest in what's happening outside. Except at the top — leadership — of course. Here and outside, negotiations go on on the basis that the world's changed. How else. But we keep it to ourselves. No-one wants to talk about it except insofar as it affects our allies' attitude towards our struggle. With the cold war melted down, will they still see our enemies, here, as theirs? There's no real open debate on what else the big changes outside mean to our ideological thinking. Nothing! We're afraid to talk about it for fear it weakens our hold on people. Afraid that if we can't offer the old socialist paradise in exchange for the capitalist hell here, we'll have turned traitor to our brothers!—

She sought his hand as a good friend: she had wanted, hadn't she, never to give up their friendship for any other intimacy, and he had confirmed it never would be. You are the only friend I ever had. If his opinion did not count for what it should, for some unknown reason, some momentum lost, it was an injustice that did not recognize his worth. A good man.

— This country's always been way ahead in industrial and technological development, considering its history, and way behind in ideas, political culture. British liberalism tottering on with its form of racism long after it was overtaken by Boer nationalism with its form of racism, white power hanging on long after it's been defeated everywhere else; I hope to god we're not going to cling to something that's had its day, when we take over. If the old socialism's dying, let's admit it and make sure we can find our liberation in the new Left that's coming.—

— You sure about that? What's coming also begins to look a lot like the return of old nationalism. — A good man; her paradox was that what she revered in him was a trusting idealism she herself — whom she saw as a lesser being — questioned.

He felt the twinge of her scepticism. — Sure as you and I are in this room. You can't make what you don't believe in. If we don't, what is there.—

Talking of change was a danger to the weekend among the orange blossom. That was exactly what Hannah was obeying: the need to change. How would change come, for her, if she stayed on in the cottage, conveniently near for visits from Sonny? How does such a love affair — come about, made inevitable by the law of life between a man and woman — obey the other law of life: moving on? He would never leave Aila; she could never really want him to leave Aila, and Will and his daughter who was an activist, like him, away over the border. He no longer would be Sonny if he did. He always would have to get out of bed and go back home; there would always be an eye on a watch to cut off the long talks, side by side, like this one, the limit of an occasional weekend lies could allow them together. The lies had spread. He knew she lied by omission when she concealed from him under laconic practical references to her future post the excitement working in her at the idea of the vast continent of Africa. The important responsibilities she would have, the visitors' room of the prison where she had sat behind the barrier (a fair caryatid existing as head and shoulders only) opening out for her to a power of ordering life — shelter and food — for starving thousands, thousands upon thousands, the world manufactures an endless wealth of refugees. The important personalities she would meet, the international circles of influence she would move in; the men who would occupy the place made for love in this, as every other way of life — a law of life he had learnt from her.

They walked hand in hand under the trees lit up by pendant oranges, the pale globes of lemons and vivid baubles of naartjies, on a tour of where they had been happy. The variety of citrus cultivated there bloomed and ripened at the same time, even on the same branch; with the perfume of blossom there was a sickly graveyard decay of rotten fruit, fallen and fastened on by flies. It squelched underfoot and she paused on one leg, holding his shoulder for balance, while she scraped her shoe clean against a trunk. He took her head in his hands and began to kiss her cruelly, he pushed hard fingers under her clothes out there where people could have come upon them, like any coarse drunk dragging a woman outside during a party. She had to fight him to stop a mating with her then and there. But back in the rondavel, her head on his arm, looking up together at the thick, smooth-stroked orderliness of thatch, a canopy for them, he was tender Sonny, wondering Sonny at the pleasure of their being. And he made love to Hannah. He would make love to her, this one weekend, make love to her so that she could never forgo it, never leave; needing Sonny.

When he came back there was no thought of killing him.

We went together to the lawyer and then with the lawyer to John Vorster Square to find out where they were holding her. The police wouldn't say.

After they took her away they came back on Sunday morning and searched the house and garage and the room in the yard that must have been a servant's room when white people lived in the house. It was our storeroom. There were garden chairs that needed new canvas and gardening tools and Baby's old bicycle and a broken food-mixer. There was a wooden mushroom I remembered my mother used to use for darning our socks. There was a box of schoolbooks, some off-cuts of material, and wrapped in the material were three hand-grenades, two limpet-mines and two land-mines. The stuff was what was left over from the curtains in my room, she'd made them when we moved in. The hand-grenades looked like small metal pineapples, I recognized them from the charts put up in post offices to alert people to the presence in the city of weapons that might blow them up. I also recognized the tubular limpet-mines. The two other objects looked like air filters from a small car engine. I wouldn't have known them for what they were.

I had followed the search through all our things in the house with smiling rage, enjoying the fruitless and disgusting rummage which discovered, as I knew it would, nothing. My father is too experienced to keep so much as a scrap of compromising paper here in our own house. I said, now you've made your bloody mess, will you go and let me clear it up — but the louts were weaving about our place like dogs who know there's a bone buried somewhere and they started on the yard. They lifted the hood of my car. They emptied the dustbin. And then among the schoolbooks and the bits of cloth left over from the curtains they found what they'd known was somewhere to be found.

He and I worked it out together; in the kitchen grabbing tea and bread to keep us going, in the car driving from police station to police station, determined to find where they were holding her. He had no doubt that it was because of him. A frame-up to trap him. They were after him and couldn't pin a new charge, so they'd come for his wife, hoping that in his anxiety for her he would reveal himself, do something that would give away real involvement with activity like the one they had set up for her. They had planted the explosives and then come back to 'find' them.