My Son's Story Read online

  The danger drained from him. His heart hesitated from beat to beat. Aila went out with the carryall under her arm and he left behind her. She put the bag into the hall cupboard where they kept old newspapers, cleaning utensils, and the cheap luggage in which they had moved their possessions to the city. He took his briefcase and went to Hannah, needing Hannah.

  A storm raided the sky. Flashed its beams on them in the darkened afternoon and tramped away, rolling tanks of thunder.

  So they had fallen asleep: his gaze came into focus on lilies. Flowers he had bought for her from a street vendor the day before it happened—the cleansing of the graves. Last week it was roses. Red roses, furled like umbrellas; roses have the scent of sex, she said, lilies the shape: he discovered all these delights while with her. They came up close, under magnified senses.

  Neither was asleep any longer, but not yet on the waking level of speech. When he arrived at her cottage his mood transformed: the loss of his daughter—her totally unexpected commitment to revolution—became a matter for pride and even excitement.—On her own! She made the big decision on her own! That little girl of mine!—This realization cleared suddenly from where it had been obscured, with Aila; by Aila’s very existence.

  Hannah was moved—and proud, for him, too. Hannah’s emotions were those of the world of commitment he and she shared, emotions changed, by harsh circumstance, to enable one to deal with a whole order of situations not accounted for in family affairs. Hannah had comforted that same girl, now on her way to a Freedom Fighters’ training camp, when she was a tearful child at her father’s trial; comforted her not ‘like a mother’, no, but as a comrade who is never a stranger to another’s (Sonny’s) distress. There was a filament of continuity from that day to this. With Hannah he felt what he ought to feel. His Baby was not the dainty little daughter of a schoolteacher, now. Aila must realize they were not living humbly in their designated place outside Benoni …

  His high emotion over Baby naturally flooded into desire between Hannah and him and there was no conflict to taint it because in her—needing Hannah—sexual happiness and political commitment were one. They made love half-clothed and fell asleep.

  His awakening linked disconnected impressions and recall as he gazed at the lilies. Baby’s rose. The brilliance of petals and leaves on graves. Hannah … her voice, one day when they were talking, criticizing someone in the movement …—But perhaps all action springs from self-preservation—paradoxically? If someone’s drowning, and I jump in to save him, what’s behind my compassion (which—all right—fires my courage, because I’m scared)? Isn’t it the fear that if / were drowning someone might walk away and ignore me?—With a contraction round the heart he suddenly was flung awake (the glare of the bulb that watched him in prison) to what had been completely avoided by preoccupation with Baby. Not come up, in speech or silences, before they loved and slept. The shot man fell again before them, and Sonny’s own body, obedient to instilled principles, the old Benoni ghetto avowals, turned to drive him somehow back through the crowd to lift up the fallen and then a bullet missed her head by not more than an inch of her blonde hair and he disobeyed and ran with her. Mayekiso was beside the man; the bony structures of Mayekiso’s forehead gleamed under sweat, the persistence of that irrelevant image was testimony to how it really happened. The man was probably dead, anyway. And Mayekiso stopped dead, as the saying goes, no-one thinks of the meaning it can have, he could have been shot dead while he bent there over the dead man. By luck (God’s will, Mayekiso with his dangling cross would believe) the bullets missed Mayekiso, too, although he didn’t turn.

  The old Benoni ghetto avowals. Not living for oneself, etc. etc. Not living only for oneself, that was the qualification. She was not oneself; neither she nor the man who fell. The other—the other life, outside self—was either of them. To run or to stop: a choice between them. Who was to say which was the most valuable? But this woman whose hand was curled against his neck, wasn’t she oneself, his need?

  Saved himself.

  Now he had something he would never speak, not to anyone, certainly not to her.

  For what if she took it smugly as a proof of love? A female triumph. What would that do to him? To his judgment of himself. To his belief that she was not like any other woman and their relationship was formed in a special and different morality: the excruciating recasting of the meaning of love in the struggle, that made him celebrate a particular kind of parting from his own child.

  But her mind surfaced on the periphery of his, maybe through the contact of their bodies, not divining what he was experiencing there beside her but instinctively circling the danger of its context.—When people make violence the ultimate test of who’s right and who’s wrong, here—you know the argument I mean—‘the struggle is no better than the oppression because violence on the part of the oppressed can never be justified’, it reduces them to the level of the oppressor and so on … people like that are so naive … I’d almost say innocent. I don’t mean that excuses them. But they babble like toddlers who don’t know what they’re saying because they haven’t lived enough to connect words with the reality of acts. Most white people here haven’t lived—not lived what life really is here … if you define the life of a country by the most general experience. If they could have been there the other day, just once, seen the police come down on us, no reason, we were all leaving the place, anyway …just shooting, and three people dead … That man, dead. If they could be there when it happens, only once, and it happens somewhere every day. They’d understand why people murder informers with whatever weapons they can lay their hands on.—

  She had given him safe passage to the open waters of generality.

  —Yes, but it’s more than that. If you define when violence is a necessity, then you’re accepting it can’t be done without in this world. And that’s hard to take, even here, even now.—

  —Oh Sonny, at least we know one thing when we’re forced, in ourselves, to accept it. We know the spit and polish of armies is to conceal the truth that war is blood, agony, rot and shit. That’s all it’s ever been. The high technology of ARMSCOR Magnus Malan boasts about. The marvellous sophistication of the latest killer, what’s-it, the Rooikat, the tank they say out-ranges and outfires anything the Russians or Americans have made. Napoleon’s grand army crawling back from Moscow on frozen feet. The Japanese skinned alive by the thing that was dropped on Hiroshima. That’s the famous military tradition. Our wars—guerrilla wars with their ragged improvisation have put an end to the lie. No more going off to fight with a brass-band send-off. If you blow yourself up with the bomb you’re placing, only the police are going to pick up the pieces. Take even the hijackers and hostage-takers: they shoot their victims or they get shot themselves when they’re overcome; or both. It’s nothing but suffering. Any kind of war, any kind. So at least if we have to accept violence, we know what we’re doing, we’re not dolling it up. I find that helps.—

  —Not for me. I never thought I ever would accept violence, even if I didn’t have to do it myself … Even if others were to do it for me. I sit in meetings, I take part in decisions where it’s taken for granted counter-violence …our violence …has its absolutely necessary role. That’s what it’s called, a role; it’s what I call it. Like in a play; and I’m not playing that particular role but I’m in the cast.—

  —Could you do it yourself?—

  But it was a mystery; Sonny could not even say he did not know. A mystery the schoolteacher had not taken into account, dreamt of, during the period when, remote from induction, he was philosophically puzzling over the extra-religious mystery of power: the power of life and death. He might have said only: all I have had was the courage to be a victim. Until now.

  A watery after-light of the storm glossed the everted lips of each lily’s single fold. They seemed to be of wet white marble, the pistils rising from carved shadow.

  —No scent.—She was remembering his daughter’s rose, in comparison.
/>   He stroked her now.—How would you know, you smoke so much.—

  A long moment of peace between them.

  —Could you get me to stop?—

  —How? If you’d tell me how.—

  She turned on her elbow, in her familiar way, propped up to see again the dark smile, the bold features scrolled about by black curls, the eyes looking out from some forest of her imagination that she had found for the first time across the visitors’ barrier in a prison.

  For him, the flesh of her face fell forward a little, plumping her cheeks. Her eyes—living all his life among soft dark eyes, he never ceased to see the curiousness of blue as the perception trained on him.—Tell me.—

  —I don’t know. Only you could find out.—

  Where to find out? In her lolling breasts that hung and swung against him, on her pale swollen lips, in the seaweed-coloured hair under her arms and the quiff, like the tuft brushed up on a fair baby’s head, over the place he entered her? Nowhere there. Somewhere else, in himself.

  Although they talked together often of his family, she seldom mentioned her ex-husband; this was because, and he understood, she seldom thought of him. He drifted to the surface of her mind, now.—Derek used to drink …a lot. He wanted to write something, he always wanted to, and then when he was fed up with law, he tried. It was interesting to watch. Just enough to drink, and it would—seem to—I don’t know—dilate his sensibilities. He would say marvellous things. He’d tell me what he was going to write. But next day it was gone. Apparently if you drink you have to write down what you’ve got hold of, right away. It’s a brief flare in the brain. It’s gone once the alcohol burns out. He couldn’t remember, next day. He never wrote it. I saw how drink wipes out memory; opens a door and then closes it. It was scary.—

  —You couldn’t stop the drinking.—

  By itself, out of habit, her hand took the packet of cigarettes from the floor beside her, shook one free and put it in her mouth, then, in a second of bewilderment, took it out and put it down awkwardly on the pillow. –No. We were finished. I couldn’t find out how. I couldn’t do anything for him.—

  Sonny sank into dread; and from that cold, sucking clay the only escape was unwelcome resentment—women, these two women with their capacity to wound, to threaten. And this one’s innocent capacity simply to be needed, resting her healing mouth on his, now, so that he squirmed in a wild tangle of bedclothes to lie over her.

  They’re more proud of Baby than of me. Even my mother. She cried when we got a message from Lusaka so we knew Baby’d gone, Baby was there, and I didn’t know what to do except what you see on television: I put my arm round her and patted her shoulder. The message came through him, one of his contacts, but she cried only when he was out of the house. And I haven’t seen her cry again.

  I gained three distinctions and a university pass and he’s going to get me a bursary through his white fellow-traveller friends. What shall I study (once you’ve left school, adults ask you that, they don’t ask patronizingly what are you going to be, any more); he doesn’t say anything, I know he’s hoping I’ll make use of his old complete works, but I’ve applied for entry to the faculty of commerce. I’ll be an educated shopkeeper with a business-school degree, how’s that, a shopkeeper, in the tradition of some of my mother’s relatives who run fruit and vegetable stalls and palm off to the blacks produce that’s gone bad. What’s the difference? It’s merchandising, same as the wholesaler who once gave him a job out of charity, and the great supporter of the cause who comes sometimes to our house—the one who’s made his fortune out of work clothing sold to the exploited masses he and my father are going to free—he supplies those maroon jerseys you see stretched over the bosoms of black nurses.

  My parents wanted to give a party to celebrate my success. And did they think they would invite—his blonde woman?

  We still have my mother’s occasional big teas for the aunties and cousins and the two grannies from our old place outside Benoni—my grandfathers are both dead, now. If nothing else exists between my mother and him, for some reason I can’t understand they co-operate in this keeping up of appearances. He makes a great effort to be there on the day. I wonder what he tells his comrades if they need him, I wonder what he tells her when she expects him in that room where her grubby bras and pants lie about. (My mother irons our shirts, his and mine, and folds them so beautifully you’d think they’d just come from a shop.)

  I have to be around on that kind of Saturday afternoon, too. I tell her I think I’m going to be out somewhere, just to see her lovely face giving me full attention, confirming, for me, that without me she’s deserted—but of course I don’t go. I won’t do what her daughter did, leave her to weep.

  The conversation of relatives over sweet cakes and fancy biscuits rolled in coconut is all questions and answers—how old is this one now, is that one married, has so and so had a baby, where is so and so living—which reach standard conclusions: that nice oh really what a blessing oh shame ay. And where’s Baby, Aila? Aren’t we going to see Baby my, last time we see her she’s growing really pretty now glamorous, né, I’m telling you, I said to Ma, we was watching a fillum, isn’t that actress the dead spit of Aila’s Baby …

  My mother has her answer. Baby is far away. Overseas.

  Overseas! Oh that’s nice. And the old ones, out of pride in our superiorly educated branch of the family and a dim notion that the places of learning are designated once and for all, as the Mount is for the Sermon, Mecca for the Black Stone (according to their religious beliefs) think they must have heard Baby is in London or even America—for if there follows another question, and what’s she doing, my father answers: furthering her education.

  And so it is my mother who’s told the lie, not he. He was telling the truth, Baby’s learning what’s necessary, in our time and for our place in the world. He’s a teacher—although they know he’s been to prison for his political activities most no doubt believe he still practises the profession they respect as the height of intellectual achievement—and his remark opens up before them, sightseers at the gates, the broad receding avenues of the grand vista they will never enter, while he and his children disappear freely down distant perspectives.

  They don’t speak the way we do (how could they, they haven’t had a teacher in the house to correct their grammar) and, on my father’s side of the family, expect to drink too much beer—that’s their way of enjoying themselves. Our house wakes up for one afternoon to the tramping back and forth to the lavatory, the coarse harmless laughter, the happy shrills and mournful wails of children, the giggling of hand-holding sweethearts, the loud partisanships of soccer and the exchange of recipes. They are our people, they are what we might have been: our parents who bettered themselves; Baby and I. How could you compare my father with Uncle Gavin debonairly wearing, even in the house, his straw hat with its paisley band, that honey-coloured, wily, quick-eyed man laughing kindly on an expanse of empty gums, who has done time for his traffic in sending stolen cars over the border to Swaziland and made enough profit to set himself up in his transport business? ‘Doing time’ isn’t just their euphemism for ‘serving a prison sentence’, which my father did: it’s the hazard of an entirely different attitude to the meaning of living. I see that, when the relatives are among us—or rather when we’re among them. My father went to prison for them—these aunties and uncles and cousins and kids who live back in the ghetto we come from. And I see that my father really loves them—more, he respects them, he hasn’t left them behind out of any ambition for himself. He has no GAVIN’S TRUCK AND CAR HIRE to show for the time he’s done. What am I to do? When I see my father like this, just as when I’ve sat, without his ever knowing, at the back of a hall when he was making a speech, I love him—again; forget everything. My mother, myself; that woman.

  The relatives are warily impressed by this house we live in illegally in a street among white people. Cousin Vyvian (our people often give their children fancy names, a dis
tinction those who count for nothing among whites may nevertheless claim) who was brought up in the same house with my father, harangues the men on his fill of beer, using an imagined movie gangster manner although he is a shelf-packer in a supermarket. —Listen, my baby, let me tell you—Sonny’s going to do a good thing for us, ek sé … A good thing.—He gazes jerkily round the colonial-pillared archway in the entrance to our sitting-room, but the imperial pretensions of some white owner who lived here, long before the neighbourhood went down enough for us to risk moving in, don’t represent the aims he’s stumbling to draw from a fuddle of frustrations.—No shit, my baby. I’m not going to take it for ever, ay. Me neither. Hotnot do this do that. Things is going to be very different. They not going to sit on their arses while I break mine for a hundred and fifty bucks a week. Ye-suss! No ways, my baby, and I’m telling you … a good thing. Let them go where they like, we coming right on and push them out. Ay, Sonny, no shit, ay? A good thing for us.—

  Forget it man Vyv Ag, come on, such a big mouth Lay off old Vyv he’s all right

  But my father steadies the arm of the ignorant and bewildered man he shared a bed with (he’s told us many times) as a child, and thanks him; it’s not a sober man holding up a drunk one, it’s an exchange of support. I don’t understand.

  I snap back the rings on the beer cans bought for the occasion, I hand round the tea and cakes for her. When they ask me what I’m doing I say I’m going to study at the university. Among whites: of course. It’s what they expect of Sonny’s boy. Sonny was always the clever one, the one who would go far. And my mother shows the women her kitchen; they’re full of admiring envy, they can see how lucky she is, always was, so refined, a real lady, and deserving, chosen by Sonny, marked out to go far with him.