Nadine Gordimer - My Son's Story

— We're going to move in among whites. It's a tactic decided upon, and I'm one who's volunteered. If you agree.—

She smiled indulgently, disbelieving. The committee had debated many tactics of resistance that did not come to anything. — What are you talking about. Tell me. How?—

— It's been done already. It'll be in one of the southern suburbs, of course, not where well-off whites live. Working-class Afrikaners want to move up in the world and they'll sell for a high price.—

— We can't afford to buy anything! In Johannesburg! Where will we get the money?—

— The money's being put up for us. We'll pay off a rent, same as we do here.—

— But it's illegal, how can you own a house in a white place?—

— That's the idea. We don't accept their segregation, we've had enough of telling them, we're showing them.—

— Us? — A pause. — So that's the idea.—

It was the nearest she came to challenging a committee's presumption in directing her family's life.

— It's a really nice house. Three bedrooms, a sitting-room, another room we can use for your sewing and my books— imagine! I'll be able to have a desk. We'll do up the kitchen, I'll build you a breakfast nook. And there's a big yard. A huge old apricot tree. Will can make a tree-house.—

Aila was inclining her head at each feature, as if marking off a list. She stopped when he did, looking at him with her black liquid gaze, appreciatively. Aila understood everything, even the things he didn't intend to bring up all at once; he could keep nothing from her, her quiet absorbed his subsumed half-thoughts, hesitations, disguising or dissembling facial expressions, and fitted together the missing sense. Because she said little herself, she did not depend on words for the supply of information from others. It was as if she had been there when he had been walking home from the station through the dreary streets and he had spoken aloud about their degradation as also some kind of shelter. Aila said: —Afrikaner neighbours.—

— Oh kids quickly get together. Dirty knees all look the same colour, hey. He'll make friends. The parents will avoid us… if we're lucky, that's all they'll do. But then we don't need them.—

— No.—

A single word had weight, from her. The subdued monosyllable was pronounced with such certainty; the habit of each other had made them even less demonstrative than they had been at the beginning of their marriage, but he was moved to go over to her. She turned away to some task. Awkwardly — she touched him only in the dark, in bed — she put up a hand to rest a moment on the nape of his neck. The spicy-sweet steam of Friar's Balsam came from the jam jar into which she had poured boiling water. — Who's that for?—

— Will's got a chest cold.—

— I'll take it to him. Is he in bed?—

He went off to tell his son about the tree-house they were going to build together. At their new home, high up, leaving the ghetto behind.

I don't understand how Baby doesn't know. Of course the fact that my father is away at all hours and sometimes for several days in itself doesn't mean anything. Long before he went to prison he had to get used to leaving us alone a lot. We had to get used to it. He wasn't a schoolteacher anymore, home every evening. He hasn't worked in the warehouse since the end of the first year in Johannesburg because the committee needed him as a full-time organizer. And then the committee made alliances with the new black trade unions which had just been allowed to be formed, and I don't know what else. All sorts of other people; groups active against the government. He was always one of those who wanted unity among them, always talking about it. When he was at home there were meetings sometimes the whole of Sunday, blacks, and our kind — lucky this house was built as a white people's house and there was room for them to shut themselves away.

And as soon as he came out of prison it started again — my father isn't the man to be scared off his political work because he's been jailed for it. Or he wasn't the man; now I don't know what he is. He goes out, away, and when he comes back, walks in, does the things he used to (pouring himself a glass of iced water from the fridge, hanging keys on one of the hooks he put up when we first moved here, asking us what sort of day we've had) he is acting. Performing what he used to be. Can't my sister feel that? It isn't something to see — the point is, it all looks the same, sounds the same. But the feeling. The body inside his same clothes. Whatever he touches, it's with the hand that has just left her. He smells different. Can't my sister smell it? Not of scent or anything, it's not that. I suppose he'd surely be too ashamed, he's become too sly for that. His own smell— of his skin — that I remember from when I was little and he'd cuddle me, or that used to be there until quite lately, when we'd share the bathroom. It's gone. I wouldn't recognize him in the dark.

Why should I be the one who had to know. Is it supposed to be some kind of a privilege? (What does he think!) She's older than I am, why should she be running around happily with her boy-friends, going off to her commercial college with silver-painted nails and Freedom T-shirts, secretly smoking pot every day.

I want to tell her, so she'll know what it's like to know. Why shouldn't she. I've tried. I said to her, he's different since he's out of prison — I mean, do you think Dad's all right? She laughed, impatient with me. She's always in a hurry. — All right! Who wouldn't be feeling good to get out! D'you expect him to be moping around like you?—

And of course she doesn't have anything to do with his body, any more, she's touching boys. My mother doesn't know about her either. I'm the only one.

Another thing he used to do, like going straight to the fridge for a glass of water, he used to call, Aila? Aila? if she wasn't in the first room he entered. He doesn't do that. If she's busy in another room he's sometimes home for half an hour or so before she knows he's there. In her innocence she takes this as one of the benefits we've won for ourselves, for the cause, for freedom: this house has privacy, it's not like the old one in the ghetto where we were together all the time. It's a space he deserves. It's something we have to be grateful to him for. He's been to prison for principles like this. When they came and took him away she kept looking around where she stood, as if a cleaver had come down as I'd seen it split a sheep carcass when she sent me to the butcher, lopping away a part of her she couldn't feel, yet. I went and took her hand but mine wasn't what was lost. I think they'd always been together in everything, she couldn't believe he was going off calmly (as he did) to an experience neither could ever have imagined would happen to them when they were young. (She was only eighteen when they married, just about the same age as my sister is now.) All the times away at meetings hadn't prepared her for this; from those he had always come home and called, Aila. And then he came out of prison with an experience she hadn't gone through with him, the way I suppose they'd had us — the children — together, and made the move to Johannesburg, and taught Baby and me to be polite but not to be afraid of the whites living in the same street because to be afraid was to accept that we didn't have the right to live there. It isn't exactly that my mother seems to want to find a way to make up, to him, for the unimaginable experience he has had on his own. (Visiting someone in prison you only have them shown to you for a few minutes, Baby and I went with her sometimes and he had been taken out of his cell, we never saw it, he talked through glass.) It's more that having been in prison for the cause of freedom has made him someone elect, not to be followed in his private thoughts by ordinary people. Like herself. Like us. She once told Baby and me she remembered, when she was very small, her grandfather looking so different, wearing a white turban when he returned from Mecca, that she ran away and hid.