Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

Gabbling in an undertone he hustled them along before him through a corridor and to a walkway enclosed in heavy diamond-mesh wire. — Just hang about. Take no notice of anyone. Point at me if you're asked what you're doing here.—

He strode up to the long counter in the room in which the walkway ended, again using his bulk to push through a confusion of policemen and other people competing for the attention of the officers in charge. A gross tap dance of policemen's boots clipped smartly up and down past the father and son. Whichever way they stood aside, they were in someone's path. Exchanges and orders in the blacks' own languages and the Afrikaans of white officers flew about in the haste and impersonality of individuals dependent, each for his own fingernail hold of authority, on a hierarchy of command. Physical bewilderment made it difficult for the father and son to be self-effacing; both let themselves be buffetted as if they were inanimate obstacles some cleaner or workman had left lying about, while what they were witnessing through the wire mesh and the doorway was some intensely piercing awareness they alone could receive, because Aila belonged to them. Because Aila belonged to them, everything they saw happening to the other victims being escorted across the yard from some cell or Black Maria out of sight could be happening, out of sight, to her. Sonny himself had been brought at that trotting gait of one in handcuffs to register in the anterooms of trials. He had seen wretched, blubbering men dragged by warders, punched, where they bent double, to make them opstaan jou bliksem, by white bullies or shaken and shouted at by black bullies, he knew as a commonplace sight a barefoot man hobbled by ankle chains shuffling as a horror risen from the slave past into the memory of computers and the glare of strip lighting in the anteroom. But Aila, Aila, Aila had nothing to do with this! Aila in the neat, sweet-smelling clothes she sewed for herself, the seed-pearl necklace round her throat, her arms drawn to her sides in rightful, subconscious shrinking from the walls that held him — that was as far as Aila had ever been, ever should be, in contact with any of this. And the boy — what must it mean to be the boy, who knew nothing of it, not a particularly manly youngster, protected too much by his mother so that despite his intelligence and his reading (yes, admit it, encouraged in that by his father) he knows only at second-hand the ugly, brutal temptation of the power of one being over another, he's been shown only the beauty and nobility of resisting it, father smiling calmly at his adolescent son brought to pay a prison visit. The father could do now what he had not been able to across the glass barriers, then: Sonny put a hand on Will's shoulder. To comfort. To be one with him.

The lawyer was flinging arms wide before the sergeant at the counter, displaying his black robe. — I'm her lawyer — you can't refuse me permission to consult with my client! I demand the officer in charge— He gave a quick imperious lift of the head towards the door, drawing the father and son to him. — My briefcase. Bring me my papers. — A round-bellied policeman blocked the way. But Sonny, like a traveller slipping into the foreign language he hasn't forgotten, argued with him wheedlingly in the idiom of prison Afrikaans. Will sidled by in the confusion and placed himself close to the lawyer. The lawyer signalled Sonny to keep talking and, indeed, the policeman's attention left him at someone's urgent yell to attend to something else. Under the harangue of threats to report the personnel to the Master of the Court, the Prosecutor and the Judge, no-one now questioned the right of the lawyer's entourage to be present.

— Ten minutes, that's all. — The commanding officer retained his self-respect in a sharp edict.

The lawyer gave no sign of accepting the condition and no explanation to the father and son; they followed him to a small partitioned booth at the end of the anteroom, people crossing and recrossing before them, and behind the bubble glass rippling distorted colours of other heads moving. The lawyer opened the door.

She was standing there smiling to greet them, husband, son, lawyer. The wardress stood back from her, the policeman at a desk was scarcely a presence in contrast to Aila's presence. She wore one of her home-tailored jackets and there were the reassuring touches of her makeup (compact of self-respect made with Sonny, unharmed, thank god) but through the familiar beauty there was a vivid strangeness. Boldly drawn. It was as if some chosen experience had seen in her, as a painter will in his subject, what she was, what was there to be discovered. In Lusaka, in secret, in prison — who knows where — she had sat for her hidden face. They had to recognize her.

This woman hugged them ardently all in turn — Sonny, the lawyer, and then, of course, the one whom she had never let out of her embrace, her son.

Will, put on a tie. God Bless Africa I VKaiser Chiefs

I stared at the back of his head on that drive and everything inside me shut down. I didn't think of anything, I didn't think of her, I was aware only of what was outside me. The stickers on the combis that cowboy lawyer raced and repassed. Sting and The Genuines playing on tape. The thick nap of the sheepskin-upholstered seat burying my hand. It's all complete, round a vacuum, whenever I want it.

When I saw the man hiding his head between his elbows while a policeman hit him, and everything inside me opened up, loosed — caged fear for her, for myself, fear of life — my father put his hand on my shoulder. He knew. A hand came down on my shoulder. To demand something of me; to be one with him. And after she had come to me, saving me for last as she used to do — a secret between us — when she came to kiss Baby and me goodnight, I saw her remarking — yes, that's the good old word — taking note: my weight, the softening round the chin and the belt slipped down under the beginnings of belly. No-one in our family's had flesh to spare. Not what she wanted me to be. But on the other hand, Baby has made her what Baby wanted her to be.

I didn't know what to say to her. I know that everything he had prepared he saw was wrong. Worse than that: she didn't need it. I could have told him that. I could have told him a lot of things he didn't notice, was always too preoccupied elsewhere to notice, things I understood, now; the visits to 'friends from work' he was pleased to accept as relieving him of responsibility for his neglect, the frequency of her trips over the border— well, he'd already realized they weren't spent sentimentalizing over a grandchild, but he was mistaken in his demeaning decision (typical! of course only his blonde has the intelligence and guts to be a comrade-in-arms) that she was manipulated, beguiled into use by Baby and that husband. He must have seen, the moment the door opened and there she was. He must have seen she was not 'innocent'; epithet that, I've heard him speechify, means denying responsibility towards your people.

He must have seen how she was. She kissed him like a young woman — I've never known my mother could be that way, I suppose now she's on the other side she knows what it's like not to be able to touch — but she didn't need comforting, there were no fears for him to still or tears for him to wipe. A lawyer is more than a husband and son when you are in the hands of those who bellow and beat a man who hides his head. I saw that. The lawyer, who had status here among the warders and policemen, he was the power, he was the one she was with. There were quick, voluble questions and answers between them, the ease of two who have established confidence in a matter of survival; he was the only one to have seen her while she was in detention, the only one who knew anything about her as she was now. She didn't have time or thought to ask us how things were at home. My father made several attempts and managed to murmur privately to her — The whole thing's insane, don't worry Aila, nothing will stick. — He meant any charges made against her. She looked at the lawyer, then at me; her dark smooth eyebrows came together in a pleat above the softness of her pausing glance, she's always looked like that when there's something not understood, and which cannot be explained. She touched my father's hand. — My turn, now. — She and the lawyer laughed.