Nadine Gordimer: My Son's Story

The schoolteacher walked back to his empty classroom; stood there at his table alone; then picked up a red marker with a broad tip and went out among his boys and girls. They stirred with bravado and fear; they had had many calls for silence from teachers who came to harangue them with orders and even to plead reason to them. But he went from cardboard to cardboard correcting spelling and adding prepositions left out. Giggles and laughter moved the children now, like one of the gusts that kicked dust spiralling away in the trampled yard. — Let's take your placards into class and rewrite them. When you want to tell people something you have to know how to express it properly. So that they will take you seriously. — And they followed him.

But it was not always so easy. Knowing he took them seriously they expected much of him. Not only his own class, but the rest of the senior school. They quickly picked up a kind of pidgin terminology of revolutionary rhetoric that was the period's replacement for schoolboy slang, and their demands as well as their actions became more and more strident. They came to him, they expected him to stand between them and the principal. He persuaded the principal to let him go with them when they determined to march across the veld to show solidarity with the children who had been locked out of their school by the police, after a boycott of classes; black solidarity. He took responsibility for keeping stones out of their hands. And he succeeded. For the first time, the old people saw his distinction ratified in a newspaper: not one of the important dailies, only a weekly published for the interests of people like themselves, but there he was above the bobbing corks of children's heads, tall and thin with dark newsprint caves where his eyes would be. The picture was cut out and passed round cousins, aunts and uncles. It was very likely the first time his photograph went into police files, as well. And when the police did come to his school because some of the children had set alight a bus in frustration that found release in ugly elation at destruction, the children expected him to stand between them and the police; he had not been able to keep petrol and matches out of their hands as he had kept stones. He went to the police station when seven among them were detained; but all that was achieved was, in trying to find out where they were being held, he had to give his name and address, and so the police had that confirming identification to file along with the newspaper photograph; he received no information.

He was doing it all for the school, for the children of the community. Aila knew that. He didn't keep anything from her. She knew some of the parents had complained about his having marched with the children over the veld to the blacks' school: a teacher should not be allowed to encourage such things. She knew that when the principal informed him of this it was a warning. The principal looked as if he were about to say what his fifth-form teacher was expecting from him; but his authority always wavered before this particular member of his staff; he added nothing. And Aila did not need her husband to spell out realization that including the community in one's concerns was bringing something the innocence of good intentions hadn't taken into account: risk to the modest security of the base from which that concern reached out — his job, the payments on the car and the refrigerator, the stock of groceries brought home every Saturday. After such signals as the interview with the principal they went matter-of-factly about the occupations of the day. But in their bedroom, the sight of her folding their clothes away, brushing the jacket he wore to school, told him that this was, that night, a ritual defending her family, asserting the persistence of the familiar against any unknown; and the awareness, for her, that he had lowered his book and was looking at her (she met his eyes in her mirror, he was behind her, lying in bed) while she plaited her hair, was a compact in which they would together accommodate the unforeseen. They were not really afraid; only on behalf of the children. And if it had been only a matter of being able to continue to feed and clothe them! Baby was nearly twelve; some her age were already running excitedly with the crowd, stones in hand, as the first child to be shot had done. Baby displayed no interest in such solidarity — she was absorbed in her dancing lessons, pop-star worship and bosom friendships, but who knew for how long? Will was too young to be at risk — in this community, unlike the black ones across the veld where no-one was too young to be out in the streets, caught between crossfire.

No wonder parents wanted removed from the school a teacher, one of their own kind, who led their children over there.

What made him allow himself to be seen with his woman in a public place? What made him go with her to that cinema, in a smart complex of underground shops and restaurants, moving stairways and piped music? Well, what made me go there: I thought no-one'd see me. No-one would know me. A suburb where well-off white people lived, always had lived; at a cheap cinema in one of the grey areas where we'd moved in there'd be bound to be people who would have recognized me. Recognized him. Seen him with her.

So we both went across the city, tried to get lost in foreign territory, deceiving each other. Though I flattered myself; he certainly didn't have me in mind as I, fifteen, had him, the parent, in mind when I bunked study leave that afternoon. Do you ever forget about them, the parents, for a moment? They are always there in the hesitations — whether you will obey or defy — the opinions — where did you get them from? — that decide what you're doing. Because even while you defy the parents, deceive them, you believe in them.

And then there he was. What are you going to see? he said. But I had seen. He kept his distance from me because he thought he must smell of her arm and shoulder pressed against his. Perhaps he'd been touching her in the dark. His hand worming up her sleeve and feeling her breast. We try it with girls at parties when someone turns off the lights.

He had shown me something I should never have been shown.

I came into the kitchen for supper when the others were already at table. I had stopped outside the door before I went in, my whole body shying away. He was there in his usual place, as if he were my father again, not the man with his blonde woman in the foyer of the cinema. I slid into my place beside my sister on the bench he had made himself — and I had helped him — when he was assembling the do-it-yourself 'breakfast nook' unit for my mother. In the ease of the family presence we often didn't actually greet each other at meals; it would have been like talking to oneself. So I didn't have to speak. He was shaking the salt cellar over his food, I saw his hand and I did not have to see his face. My mother was talking softly, commenting on something or other Baby must have mentioned, as she went between stove and table as a bird flies back and forth with food to drop into the open beaks of her young. — Sit down and eat. He can help himself. — My father spoke of me like that; he spoke with gentle consideration to my mother. Then I looked up at him, perhaps he was willing me to do so. We saw each other again.

Nothing happened; as if nothing had happened. My mother said I looked tired. — I think he ought to be taking Sanatogen.—

— Oh Aila, you don't believe that nonsense! — He was smiling at her.

— Well, everybody took it for exam nerves when I was at school. Will, won't you have a glass of milk? Don't you think he's done enough, he's been at it all day, Sonny, he should close his books and have an early night. Tell him. — Although my father was no longer a schoolteacher she kept the habit of referring to him as the expert in matters affecting our education. And those deeply-recessed eyes gazed at me across the table: —Now that's a good idea. Sleep's the best tonic. What's the subject you write next week?—