Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

— But why take the whole house to pieces first. — Because you were there, Will.—

At the reminder of his absence his cheek twitched, I almost felt sorry for him, though where the hell was he… he wasn't even where he knows I could find him, when it happened.

He insisted they must have planted the stuff when they came to take her; but I answered the door, I saw them leave with her, nobody went near the storeroom.

— They must have come back after you'd gone to sleep again. You didn't hear anything?—

He was keenly enquiring-I suppose he thinks he might light upon some testimony from me he might use to her advantage; he's accustomed to finding me useful. But he's the one who, once again, wasn't there.

So I stared at him. — I went to look for you.—

— Oh. I see.—

His face closed away, in defence, to an archetype — his big nose carved and dominant, his lips mauvish and curving in a strong dark line. He escaped into an old schoolmasterish gesture, sounding the table with a tapping thumb.

— I left the whole place open, the lights were on. Anyone coming would have thought they'd be bound to be seen.—

No reproach for my carelessness; hardly!

But if we couldn't be father and son in any other way, we had a single purpose in our determination to get my mother out. A new conspiracy. And he was brave, of course — I've always admired his courage — because he constantly showed himself in places and situations where they might have decided to pick him up. They often do this when relatives of a detainee or indicted prisoner are lured to police stations by the presence of one of their own held somewhere behind walls. I was surely in no danger, a 'clean' member of the family, like my mother.

— They even gave her a passport — just like that. — He explained that he was, most unfortunately, away on urgent matters (the lawyer knew that could only mean the movement's affairs) when Aila was arrested but he was taking full responsibility on himself for whatever that innocent woman might be charged with. — Let them arrest me. I'm willing to be involved up to the hilt, so long as they let her go. The whole thing is insane. Aila! Can't you do something, get them to let her out and take me as hostage for her? I'm serious.—

I listened and I saw he was. But the lawyer stretched his legs before his chair and pulled at his lower lip. — Sonny, you're serious about nonsense, then. You know you can't make such deals with them. For god's sake… you're not green… you know it all well enough. It's the old process; as soon as they charge her we'll keep pegging away for bail, I'll press for the earliest possible appearance for the application.—

I wouldn't let him go alone to police stations when we were looking for her. I don't know why I should have thought that would be any protection for him; but I knew what she'd ask me to do, even when she herself couldn't tell me. We took food and clean clothing. He knows what you need in jail. He also knows how to talk to the police; apparently, once they're aware you've been inside and come out again, not afraid of them no matter what they did to you, you can talk to them and they can't refuse an answer as easily as they do to other people who don't know prisons, familiar ground to both jailers and jailed. Where the lawyer had no success in finding my mother's whereabouts, my father did, acting on a tip, I suppose, from the detainees' support organization. My mother was not at Diepkloof, where we'd thought her to be and he'd argued with the Major who'd refused to accept her change of clothing. They'd taken her to a jail in some dorp. I drove him there. They wouldn't let us see her but they accepted the food and clothes.

— And now? — I waited for him to give the word to start back because he seemed coiled in a daze; he sat hunched beside me as if he might leap out and hammer on the door as I did— the prison doors.

— It's a better place than Sun City.* Better conditions.—

But I'm not an old lag. She's in prison, that's all I know.

'Sun City', actually a casino resort, is the name given by political prisoners to Diepkloof Prison, near Johannesburg.

The big boys — the leadership — come round to the house again, the way people who've become too busy or important for old friends arrive to offer condolences. He shuts himself in with them; I suppose there may be something to be gained from their experience in dealing with the ways of Security. But if anything happens to her it's his doing. He knows that, every time he catches me looking at him. The little girl who's attached herself to me burst into tears when I told her what had happened, and she's offered to come and 'look after us'. But it's nobody's business — except his and mine. We eat together and go over the details of that night and anything else of relevance that might be recalled. I've told him of the phone calls; no lead there. One of his comrades suggests someone talked under interrogation — but about what? There had to be something to give away if someone talked. My father said, again, alone with me, what the lawyer had dismissed as nonsense from a man of his experience and intelligence. He carried it further. — What if I walk into the Major's office and tell them I hid the stuff in the yard, the limpet-mines and the hand-grenades planted there are mine?—

No man — no husband — could do more, even if he were to have loved my mother. I don't know the explanation. If she were one of his comrades — maybe they have to do that sort of thing if one individual were to be more valuable to the movement than another. That'd be more like it. But in this case. my mother!

If he loves her as much as that, he nevertheless goes off some evenings to that woman. He moves about the kitchen aimlessly with his bent back to me. Says to me at the door, I won't be late, or pauses, not knowing how to say what he really wants to, which is that I'll know where to find him if anything new happens, to assure me that's where he'll be, this time.

He leaves looking as if he's going to hang himself.

What would he do if he came home and found her here, suddenly released?

Before my father could go to the police and claim he was the possessor of the explosives hidden in our yard our lawyer was shown the signed statement in which my mother admitted she had consented to allow the storeroom to be used to store certain persons' property 'for a few nights'.

It was my mother who had talked under interrogation.

I know why she did. It was to be sure neither her husband nor I would be held responsible. She had insisted she didn't know the name or names of whoever was to remove the 'property'; and she refused to reveal the name or names of whoever had entrusted the 'property' to her, or to say why she had cooperated.

She had been briefed on how to deal with interrogators. My father clasped fist in hand as if stunning himself, his knees spread and his head sunk over his sagging body. The lawyer was embarrassed and alarmed. He tamely filled a glass of water; could not offer it to a man who had been through detention and imprisonment himself, a veteran of challenge to jailers of all kinds. My father looked up all round, wanting to know from somewhere — from me, because I was there, I was always there at home, her boy, mother's boy, how it happened? When? Where did my mother learn these things? How, without his having noticed it, had she come to kinds of knowledge that were not for her? And what was it she knew? Whom did she know whose names she couldn't reveal? What was Aila doing, all those months, without him?

I was not stunned; I was elated. It didn't last — she was charged, the case didn't look good, the lawyer admitted — but (I have my crazy moments, too) I felt a release soar up from somewhere in me, scattering showers of light. She was in prison and she was free, free of him, free of me. What nonsense.