My Son's Story Read online

  Of course ‘we know each other’. She entered our house when he was in detention. I let her in. I opened the door to her myself; I always went to the door, then, the schoolboy was the man of the house for my mother and sister, now that he was not there. Each time, I prepared my expression, the way I would stand to confront the police come to search the house once again. But it was a blonde woman with the naked face and apologetic, presumptuous familiarity, in her smile, of people who come to help. It was her job; she was the representative of an international human rights organization sent to monitor political detentions and trials, and to assist people like my father and their families. We didn’t need groceries, my school fees were paid; my mother and Baby (after school) were both working and there was no rent owed because when we moved to the city my father had bought that house in what later was called a ‘grey area’ where people of our kind defied the law and settled in among whites.

  So we didn’t need her. She sat on the edge of our sofa and drank tea and offered what is known as moral support. She talked about the probability of my father being brought to trial, the iniquity of the likely charges, the foreboding Defence lawyers always had, in such cases, that one would get a ‘bad judge’, a secret member of the Broederbond. She was showing—but not showing off, she was all humility before our family’s trouble—inside knowledge she must have gathered from interviews with the lawyers and furtive exchanges in court with the accused in trials she had already attended, exchanges made across the barrier between the public gallery and the dock during the judge’s tea recess. She was so intense it seemed my quiet mother, her hair groomed and elegant legs neatly crossed as if her husband were there to approve of the standard—the selfrespect—she kept up, was the one to supply support and encouragement.

  Of course I know her. That broad pink expanse of face they have, where the features don’t appear surely drawn as ours are, our dark lips, our abundant, glossy dark lashes and eyebrows, the shadows that give depth to the contours of our nostrils. Pinkish and white-downy-blurred; her pink, unpainted lips, the embroidered blouse over some sort of shapeless soft cushion (it dented when she moved) that must be her breasts, the long denim skirt with its guerrilla military pockets—couldn’t she make up her mind whether she wanted to look as if she’d just come from a garden party or a Freedom Fighters’ hide in the bush? Everything undefined; except the eyes. Blue, of course. Not very large and like the dabs filled in with brilliant colour on an otherwise unfinished sketch.

  And even if I hadn’t known her, I could have put her together like those composite drawings of wanted criminals you see in the papers, an identikit. The schoolboy’s wet dream. My father’s woman. But I had no voluptuous fantasy that night. I woke up in the dark. It’s hard for an adolescent boy to allow himself to weep; the sound is horrible, I suppose because it’s his voice that’s breaking.

  The schoolteacher had a yearning—he thought it was to improve himself. This was not in conflict with usefulness. He could only improve the quality of life for the school, for the community across the veld from the town, if he himself ‘enriched his mind’—as he thought of it. He could not belong to whatever political debate there was in the town. Not that that was much loss, he was aware, since from accounts he read in the local paper it consisted of squabbles for control of the municipal council and the office of mayor between two groups prejudiced against each other, the Afrikaans-speaking and the English-speaking, with common purpose principally in keeping their jobs, benches, cinemas, library—the town—white. He could not belong to whatever cultural circles the town had—the amateur players’ theatre, the chamber music society started by German Jewish refugees who had arrived during the war, bringing culture as well as the brewing of good coffee to a mining town that knew only Gilbert and Sullivan and a boiled chicory mixture. He could not belong to the Sunday bird-watchers’ group, although he was interested in nature and sometimes took his children by train to the zoo in the city on the weekly day when it was open to their kind, and into no-man’s-land, the stretch of veld between where his community lived and the town, to learn the habits of the mongoose and the dung-beetle, who lived there among the mine-dumps. He could not belong to the chess club (another initiative of the German Jews to create intellectual life in a town without any).

  He could not afford to buy many books. He thought he ought to have some guidance towards those that were important, which might feed the yearning for whose satisfaction he was not sure what was really needed. Or rather what was wanting. He, too, enrolled in a correspondence course. He chose comparative literature and discovered Kafka to add to his Shakespearean source of transcendence—a way out of battered classrooms, the press of Saturday people, the promiscuity of thin-walled houses, and at the same time back into them again with a deeper sense of what the life in them might mean. Kafka named what he had no names for. The town whose walls were wandered around by the Saturday people was the Castle; the library whose doors he stood before were the gates of the law at which K. sat, year after year, always to be told he must wait for entry. The sin for which the schoolteacher’s kind were banished to a prescribed area, proscribed in everything they did, procreating, being born, dying, at work or at play, was the sin Joseph K. was summoned to answer for to an immanent power, not knowing what the charge was, knowing only that if that power said he was guilty of something, then he was decreed so.

  This philosophizing reconciled Sonny, a profoundly defeatist way of staunching the kind of slow flux which is yearning. He was able to find satisfaction in the detachment of seeing the municipality and the Greek tearoom where his family could not sit down, in these terms. He became fascinated, as an intellectual exercise, with the idea of power as an abstraction, an extra-religious mystery, since religions explained away all mystery in the person of mythical beings, one religion even awkwardly offering a half-god, half-man, born of a virgin woman, so as to make that particular myth somehow more credible. And although Kafka explained the context of the schoolteacher’s life better than Shakespeare, Sonny did not go so far as to believe, with Kafka, that the power in which people are held powerless exists only in their own submission.

  He knew better. There were the local law-makers, proconsuls, gauleiters in the town’s council chamber under the photographs of past mayors and the motto CARPE DIEM.

  I think they were happy when my sister and I were little, in that township we lived in outside the Reef town. So far as children can know what their parents are; considerate, discreet parents like ours, not the drunken violent ones, some of our neighbours whose ugly lives came reverberating through our walls, and whose kids ran to our house out of fear of what was being revealed to them. Sometimes a woman would ask my father to ‘speak to’ her husband. I hung around my father, climbing on the back of his old armchair or leaning against his legs when strangers were there and understanding snatches of what was being said: the man had beaten her, he was drunk every night, he was going to lose his job with a builder. I stared in curiosity at the fear-distorted, snivelling face I never saw in my own home.

  It wasn’t only self-respect my father had; people respected him, not even a drunk would curse him. I don’t know what made all sorts of men and women feel he would find for them their way out of the bewilderment of debt, ignorance, promiscuity and insecurity that giddied them, so that they lunged from one sordid obstacle to the next. It was partly, I suppose, because of what he did at the school, and then later when he got the township manager to let him start up the youth club; people saw him as one of themselves—powerless—who nevertheless had the special kind of self-respect (yes, that again) that makes it possible to influence others—take on responsibility for their lives in a way different from that of those, the masters, in the administrative offices, courtrooms and police stations. He did things for other people the way he did things for us—his family. That was it; to give came to him naturally, as it came to them to take.

  Yet my parents didn’t have a lot of friends. Not what the neighbo
urs would call friends. The Sunday gatherings we children saw at other people’s houses when we went to play with their children were not customary in our house. There were no beer and brandy bottles lying about our yard and no shuffling and giggling to music so loud it made the transistor radio balanced on the stoep steps buzz and tremble. Uncles and aunts and cousins sometimes came to us for tea, and once in a while to Sunday lunch when my mother would have spent the whole of Saturday preparing the traditional foods that had come down to her, like her oriental beauty half-hidden by neat blouses and skirts, while the rest of that side of her ancestral heritage had been buried in generations of intermarriage and cross-cultural alliances of other kinds. Mostly we did things alone together—my mother, my father, and we children. Before Baby got interested in boys, she would help my mother make dresses for her. There was a horseshoe magnet I loved to use, first spilling the tin of pins on the floor and then drawing them in prickly bunches to the metal, getting in the way of the girls (as my father affectionately called them). My father taught me how to change fuses and replace the cord on my mother’s steam iron. He kept everything in the house in good order; we couldn’t afford to call in professional repair men. But he didn’t teach me to service our car and he never learnt to do so himself—there was a young apprentice mechanic, a cousin who came at weekends, earned a bit of extra pocket-money and kept the old second-hand Ford going. I liked the smell of the greasy pouch of oily black tools he opened out on the dirt floor of the shed my father had put up to house the car; it reminded me of the axles of great steam engines my father had taken me to see in an open-air museum. He promised to find a line on which they were still in use, and take me for a ride; that was the one promise I can remember he didn’t keep. Probably he found that people of our kind weren’t permitted to enjoy the treat, and he didn’t want to tell me.

  We didn’t have any particular sense of what we were—my sister and I. I mean, my father made of the circumscription of our life within the areas open to us a charmed circle. Of a kind. I see that I don’t want to admit that, now, because it comes to me as a criticism, but the truth is that it did give us some sort of security. He didn’t keep from us, in general, the knowledge that there were places we couldn’t go, things we couldn’t do; but he never tried to expose us to such places, he substituted so many things we could do. My sister had dancing lessons and he taught me to play chess. I was allowed to stay up quite late on Friday night—no school next day—and we’d sit at the table in the kitchen after supper was cleared away, his great black eyes on me, encouraging, serious, crinkling into a smile back in their darkness, while I hesitated to make my move. Every Saturday when we went to town he bought a comic each for me and my sister—not the kind where the vocabulary was limited to onomatopoeic exclamations by supermen (those I borrowed secretly from my pals), but publications from England with stories of brave fighter pilots and King Arthur’s Round Table, for me, and romantic fables retold in pictures for my sister.

  Why do I say ‘he’ made the charmed circle in which we lived in innocence? My mother, too, drew it around us. But although they planned everything together and if there was a decision to be made affecting us, or any other matter that could be discussed in front of us, we would see him looking at her (the way he looked at me over the chess board) while he awaited her opinion, I am right in attributing the drawing of the safe circle of our lives, then, to him. It was always as if he knew what she wanted, for him and us, and that she knew he would find the way to articulate the components of daily life accordingly. For what she wanted was, in essence, always what he wanted; and that is not as simple or purely submissive as it sounds. I didn’t—don’t—pretend to understand how. It was between them, and will not be available to any child of theirs, ever.

  What did it matter that the seaside hotels, the beaches, pleasure-grounds with swimming-pools were not for us? We couldn’t afford hotels, anyway; a fun fair for the use of our kind came to our area at Easter, the circus came at Christmas, and we picnicked in the no-man’s-land of veld between the mine-dumps, where in the summer a spruit ran between the reeds and my father showed us how the weaver birds make their hanging nests. There, on our rug, overseen by nobody, safe from everybody, the drunks next door and the municipality in the town, my father would lay his head in my mother’s lap and we children would lie against their sides, under the warmth of their arms. A happy childhood.

  But at fifteen you are no longer a child.

  Halfway between: the schoolteacher lived and taught and carried out his uplifting projects in the community with the municipal council seated under its coat-of-arms on the one side of the veld, and the real blacks—more, many more of them than the whites, ‘coloureds’ and Indians counted together—on the other. His community had a certain kind of communication with the real blacks, as it did with the town through the Saturday dispensation; but rather different. Not defined—and it was this lack of definition in itself that was never to be questioned, but observed like a taboo, something which no-one, while following, ever could admit to. The blacks appeared in the community hawking tomatoes and onions, putting up a fence, digging a trench, even hanging out the washing in those households a rung more affluent than that of a schoolteacher. Their languages, their laughter yelled from block to block, sounded unceasingly through the day as cicadas thrum during hot hours. They went back to their own areas when the work was done; removed from the community as the community was from the white town. Out of the way. Better that way. The sight of them was a stirring deep down: it was because of them that the schoolteacher’s community was what it was: cast outside the town. Needing uplift. It was because of them whose pigment darkened the blood, procreated a murky dilution in the veins of the white town, disowned by the white town, that the community was disqualified for the birthright of the cinema, the library, the lavatories and the coat-of-arms. To be confronted with the monumental, friendly high-riding backsides of the women, the dusty felted heads of the men, the beauty of the lolling babies on the mothers’ backs—it was surely only to see and know that if you wanted to claim a self that, by right, ought to be accepted by the town, you had another self with an equal right—one that was a malediction, not to be thought of—to be claimed by them. With that strain of pigment went more interdictions, a passbook to be produced tremblingly before policemen, dirtier work, even poorer places to live and die in. Better to keep them at a distance, not recognize any feature in them. And yet they were useful; the self that recognized something of itself in the franchised of the town inherited along with that resemblance the town’s assumption that blacks were there to do things you didn’t want to do, that were beneath your station; for nothing was beneath theirs.

  The schoolteacher always had been aware of the blacks in another way; well, this was nascent in that vague yet insistent sense of responsibility he had. In the years when he was getting the lint of his father’s trade out of his curls, carrying his books to the light from the moted gloom where the pouffes and sofas from big houses in the town were pinned into new velvet like women for whom his father, on his hunkers, was the dressmaker, the blacks were clustering around enormous ideas. Equality. At so much a day; while he was a child it was expressed that humble way: a pound a day, that’s all. The people in his community were underpaid, too. As an adult, he earned less than a white teacher with the same level of qualification. But he was set on sitting up at night studying for a higher qualification, maybe even getting a university degree; that was how he would better himself, not by going to meetings or getting arrested on the march. Equality; he went to Shakespeare for a definition with more authority than those given on makeshift platforms in the veld. The trouble was, he didn’t feel himself inferior—inferior to what, to whom? He was so preoccupied with an inner life that he took little notice of the humiliations and slights that pushed and jabbed at him the moment he ventured outside the community. If, like the rest of his kind, he was a Sebastian, the arrows did not penetrate his sense of self. If they had�
�if he had been really black?—he might have joined, waved a fist. Admiring the real blacks from this sort of distancing, he left it to them. It seemed more their affair; they had no family resemblance that might somehow, someday, promote them to acceptance among the townspeople. And in this spectator status he was not alone; the community had hopes of the blacks, and also scepticism about these hopes. There was fervent stoep and yard talk, they going to moer the lanies you’ll see ou they quite right make the Boers shit their pants there in Pretoria what you think you talking about they going to get a rope round their necks that what they putting up their hands for, bracelets man bullets up the backside you can’t win against whitey. Only a few would cross the veld to join them.

  He had cousins in the Cape who belonged to a resistance movement of their kind’s own, and one of them came up with his mate to stay in the old people’s house for a weekend while trying to get a branch going in the community, but they could see that somehow, although he was so intelligent, and at first they were encouraged by his clear grasp of their aims, Sonny would not be the one to take on the task. He told himself—seeing their expressions, hearing snatches of their remarks in his mind, a day or two afterwards—that he must first get his higher certificate and then he’d see. On the train going back to Mannenberg the cousins dismissed him between themselves as useless, a sell-out, interested in getting some piddling bit of paper that would make him the paid agent of handout education.