Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

No bed. A dirty square on the wall behind where it was; I remembered an ugly picture, hanging there. House-plants dead for lack of water. Two burst cushions spilling their guts in a corner. There was the buzzing silence of desertion. All the movements and syllables that had sounded there, all that had happened there, caught in confusion, eddying without sense, motes drifting within the walls, falling back from them. That's what's over. That's the past, its dust not settled.

I put my head in. The smell of smoke. Her smell. He came home smelling of smoke, he didn't smell of the semen he'd given her. That bed. To paraphrase one of my father's famous quotations (the Bible, this time?), that bed gave up the ghost.

The sensation you expect doesn't come when and where you seek it. I didn't find exorcism then and there.

Aila was applying herself conscientiously to the long lists of questions the lawyers, while planning her defence, gave her, and to the full account required of everything she had thought and done that led to the circumstances of her indictment. She made notes by hand and typed sheet after sheet. He sat across the table from her as they had done when he was the schoolteacher correcting his class papers and she was improving herself by correspondence courses. But if she looked up to ask something of him now, it was seeking the advice of a comrade more experienced in the pitfalls of preparing for a trial. He suppressed a wave of distress and denial that came over him every time, and answered her; she would nod in thanks, and scribble something in a margin. Her image on the other side of the book or newspaper in front of him penetrated the pages. The longer he waited to speak the fewer the opportunities would be; with every line she wrote, every consultation with the Defence, every visit of his comrades in the leadership, the preposterous was becoming the accepted reality, made so not only by the State, but by the lawyers, the movement, taking it as a fact: Aila, Aila a revolutionary responsible for her acts. Preparing Aila for what — he knew, he knew — only a revolutionary with total inner certainty, who has chosen, can withstand.

And with a sense of stretching his fingertips at something that was disappearing from his grasp, he suddenly spoke as he handed her a cup of tea he'd brought to sustain her at her task.

— What made you do it?—

Late at night; she looked around the room to make sure they were alone, to see if the boy, Will, was there to give her support or credence — he was often a presence, wearing his headphones so that the music he listened to didn't disturb her.

She took her time. It even could be Aila didn't feel obliged to answer; that, at last, the reproach she had never made would take this form. Sonny had a passing foreboding; but she spoke.

— I understood.—

He gazed at her; she seemed almost to transform into her old laconic gentleness.

— What did you understand that you didn't understand before, here? How could Baby — blatantly! — use her mother like that? I can't believe it. I can't forgive her. — With alarm he heard his voice hoarse — if the sphincter of tears failed, Aila would know they were not for her but because he was rejecting Baby. His daughter.

— Nothing to forgive. She did nothing.—

— That's not true. All right — so it was the people you met through her. She exposed you. Through her. — (I'll cast out my daughter for you, was passing between them in the pause. See, I'll do that for you.) — Of course, it's exciting, important, free, there, after the way we are here. Oh I'm sure. The compromises, the pettiness. they're gone, it's war, not getting by with your white neighbours to prove a point. But if you wanted more, there's plenty to do here, we could have. at least. we could have discussed it.—

— I don't know whether I wanted to.—

He waited. — Aila. Be active, or discuss it? Apparently you could discuss it with Baby. If you say she wasn't the one to use you.—

— You were so proud of her. Don't speak badly about her now. Don't spoil something for yourself.—

He experienced a contraction of his stomach muscles in an emotion new to him, inevitable, the nausea of remorse, that always must be experienced entirely alone; he had spoiled so much. Aila drank her tea and he saw her focus, under stiff dark lashes, shift along a line or two of her written testimony, but she turned away from it as if for the moment the words held the wrong meaning. She looked at him and then suddenly began to speak like someone telling a story. — Baby and he take the child with them everywhere, you know. And he's still so little. Meetings, parties — he's up at parties until one in the morning. The first time, I was really shocked, I told them it was wrong, poor little thing. I mean, you and I. when we went out while the children were small, someone came to sit in with them, they were at home in their own beds by eight o'clock to get a good night's rest. But one time when I arrived — I don't remember whether that was the fourth visit or the third — they told me that they took the little one with them to a party one night and when they came home they found the house had been bombed. You remember that second South African raid over the border, Baby sent a message after the bombing of a safe house, reassuring us it wasn't where they were living? Well, she did that because she didn't want you — us — to worry; and when she told me, she made me promise not to tell you. But it was the house where they'd been living. If they'd left the child at home with a sitter that night — with someone like me.—

Isolation is a sensation like cold. It took him up from his hands and feet through to the core of his being. If he had nothing left but to turn against Baby, who had escaped death a second time without his knowing, what place was he in, within himself?

— That was it?—

— I think so.—

— Difficult to follow you, Aila. You leave so much out.—

— I know.—

— You 'understood'.—

— Yes.—

— Can't you explain? Revenge? If you've been getting a political education you should know that's not an acceptable motivation in our struggle. Some mystical experience you've gone through, or what? Understood what?—

— The necessity for what I've done. — She placed the outer edge of each hand, fingers extended and close together, as a frame on either side of the sheets of testimony in front of her. And she placed herself before him, to be judged by him.

If he had been the one with the right to judge her. As her husband? As a comrade? The construction he had skilfully made of his life was uninhabitable, his categories were useless, nothing fitted his need. Needing Hannah. His attraction to Hannah belonged to the distorted place and time in which they — all of them — he, Aila, Hannah, lived. With Hannah there was the sexuality of commitment; for commitment implies danger, and the blind primal instinct is to ensure the species survives in circumstances of danger, even when the individual animal dies or the plant has had its season. In this freak displacement, the biological drive of his life, which belonged with his wife and the children he'd begotten, was diverted to his lover. He and Hannah begot no child; the revolutionary movement was to be their survivor. The excitement of their mating was for that. But Aila was the revolutionary, now.

When they drove together to the police station to report every day, the weird routine performed together seemed to him a possibility of the return to the domestic intimacy they had had, once. A strange return it would have been, but surely something from which they both began must be there, beneath whatever unimaginably changed circumstances between them. He was at home, now, as he used to be, once. The other circumstances made this possible: the cottage was abandoned; he had somehow been eased out of high position in the movement.