Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

The faces they draw over their faces, the big down-turned mouth and the little vertical points below and above the middle of each eye, that suggest shed tears. When he sat opposite me at supper that first night what face did he see on me. What face did he make me wear, from then on, to conceal him, what he was doing — my knowledge of it — from us: my mother, my sister, myself.

Perhaps if we had never left our area outside the small town it would never have happened? We should never have been there, at that cinema. She would never have found him, us— his blonde woman. I've thought of all the things that would have had to be avoided if I were not to have met my father at that cinema on an afternoon before the exams. I've lived them over in my mind because I did not know how to live now that I had met him, now that I had seen, not the movie I bunked swotting for, but what our own life is.

Although he worked in the city we had gone on living in our little house on the Reef for a time. My parents were paying off monthly instalments against the municipal loan with which they had bought it; my mother had her job running the crèche, for which eventually there had been granted a municipal subsidy by the town councillors. So we stayed where we were. Except for him, everything was in its place. The swing he had put up in the back yard when we were little, the kennel I'd helped him build for our Mickey, the dog he'd taken me to choose at the SPCA. While he was away with his committees and meetings at weekends my mother tried to do with us the things we all used to do together. And the last Sunday picnic before we left our home was in the winter. The last time; the end of winter. The veld had been fired to let the new growth come through, the sun burned off the night's frost, vaporized as a cool zest on the smell of ashes. A black landscape with only our mountains, the mine-dumps, yellow in the shadowless light. My mother spread a sheet of plastic under our rug over the sharp black stubble that puffed like smoke under our feet and dirtied our socks. There were the things we liked to eat, naartjies whose brilliant orange skins Baby arranged in flower patterns on the blackness. Did he say, my daughter's going to be an artist? Because he was there. At that last picnic we had on our old patch of veld between the dumps, he was with us. He and I rambled off, I poking with a stick at every mound and hole for what treasures I did not know, and he showed me some, he discovered them for me; he always did. There was the skeleton of a fledgling caught by the fire, and he said we could take it home and wire it together. Then he spied for me the cast of a songololo thick as my middle finger, I held it up and could see the sky through it at the end of its tiny tunnel. Ice-blue sky, yellow dumps, black veld, like the primary colours of a flag. Our burnt-out picnic. She would never have known where to find us, there.

But when she came to the house in Johannesburg she had already found him. On her errands of mercy and justice she had visited the prison.

The ex-schoolteacher and his wife discussed the decision as they always had done everything, before they left the Reef town. They talked over months, as people who are very close to one another do, while carrying on the routine, whether of tasks or rest, that is the context of their common being. He was replacing the element in the kettle and she was cutting up vegetables for one of her delicious cheap dishes; she was in the bath and he came in and took up what he had been saying after Baby and Will had gone to bed; he and his wife were themselves in bed, had said goodnight and turned away, then slowly talk began again.

It was the biggest decision of their lives so far. Marriage? Love had led them so gently into that. To leave the place where they had courted, where the children had been born, where everybody knew them, knew she was Sonny's wife, Baby and Will were Sonny's children. Aila's silences said things like this.

— But what is this house? A hovel you've slaved away to make into something decent. How much longer can we have Baby sharing a room with her brother — she's a big girl, now. Paying the town council interest for another twenty-five years, thirty years, the never-never, we can't even give our kids a little room each. We don't have a vote for their council but they take our money for the privilege of living in this ghetto. — He had never before used this term to her, for their home. A changing vocabulary was accompanying the transformation of Sonny to 'Sonny' the political personality defined by a middle, nickname. She knew he was leading her into a different life, patiently, step by step neither he nor she was sure she could follow. Her spoken contribution to their discussions was mostly questions. — But we won't find anything much better where we're going, will we? Where are we going to live? — None knew more than a member of the committee against removals about the shortage of shelter for people of their kind, decades- generations-long. 'Housing' meant finding a curtained-off portion of a room, a garage, a tin lean-to. Then there was the matter of her job. Where would she find work in Johannesburg? Her kind of work. — I suppose I could do something else. get taken on in a factory. — Aila was referring to his connections with the clothing industry, he knew; it alarmed him. Unthinkable that through him Aila should sit bent over a machine. Jostle with factory girls in the street. He would find some solution, he would not show his alarm. Suddenly he saw exactly, precisely what she was doing, before him, at that moment: slicing green beans diagonally into sections of the same length, cutting yellow and red bell peppers into slivers of identical thickness, all perishable, all beautiful as a mosaic. Aila's hands were not coarsened and dried by the housework she did; she went to bed with him every night with them creamed and in cotton gloves. The momentary distraction was not a distraction but a focus that thrust him, face down, in to the organic order and aesthetic discipline of Aila's life, that he was uprooting.

She sat in the bath soaping her neck. Her hair was piled up and tied out of the way in the old purple scarf that had its place on a hook among towels. He was already drawing breath to speak when he came through the door. — Why should you be 'grateful' for the measly subsidy they give so you can run a crèche for them.—

— Not for them, for the children.—

— Ah no, no, for them. So they can sit in their council chamber and congratulate themselves on 'upgrading' living conditions in the ghetto where our kids are brought up. Where we're supposed to live and die. The place where they confine us. Zoo. Leper colony. Asylum. It's humiliating to take from them, Aila. Let them have it.—

Her questions were never objections; they were the practical consequence of acceptance. She did not oppose the move. She was careful to present it to their children as something exciting and desirable. And the children were ready to quit with heart-lessness their friends, their school, the four walls and small yard where they had played. Baby had the teenager's longing for the life she imagined existed in the city; Will cared only about taking the dog along. To Johannesburg, Johannesburg! Nobody asked exactly where. The husband, the father, was taking care of that.

When he knew where they were going to live the slither of the commuter train over the rails, taking him home from the warehouse, raced his bravado excitement, but as he walked the familiar streets each night, back to the old house, through the greasy paper litter outside the fish and chips shop, past the liquor store with its iron bars and attendant drunk beggars, past the funeral parlour where the great shining black car stood always ready to take the poor grandly on a last ride, past his old school with its broken windows and the graffiti of freedom that still had not come — as he deserted this, he realized that a certain shelter was being given up, for the family. Shabby, degrading shelter — but nevertheless. He himself had the strength of a mission to arm him; his family — Aila — it would be different for them. So he calmed his euphoria before he told her. And it was not in front of the children.