My Son's Story Read online

  It was in this state that she developed the persistence, the bold lies, the lack of scruple in threatening international action to pressure prison authorities to allow her to see detainees. And it was in this state she understood her mission to visit their families.

  She drove a Volkswagen Beetle through the battleground streets of Soweto to find old people who didn’t know whether to trust her, she was received in the neat segregated suburbia of Bosmont and Lenasia by women who didn’t know how they were going to keep up payments on the glossy furniture, she lost herself in the squatter camps where addresses didn’t exist and the only routes marked in the summer muck of mud and rot were those rutted by the wheelbarrows of people fetching their supplies of beer from the liquor store on the main road. The house in the lower-class white suburb into which one of the detainees had moved his family illegally had a twirly wroughtiron gate and a plaster pelican, no doubt left behind by the white owners as the shed cast of any creature exactly reveals itself. The wife was beautiful and correct, composed, stockings and high heels—it had the effect of making Hannah feel not intrusive but unnecessary, and talking away to cover this up. The wife kept listening sympathetically, making Hannah’s confusion worse. This quiet woman apparently was accustomed to being obeyed. There was tea ordered to be brought in by a daughter in whom the mother’s beauty was reproduced as pert prettiness. A schoolgirl who worked at weekends; and the wife had a good job, she politely made it perfectly clear they wanted no-one to enter the arrangements they themselves had made to manage without the father of the family. The mother, with her fine, slow smile (what perfect teeth for a middle-aged woman; Hannah’s were much repaired at only thirty) put a hand on the shoulder of an overgrown-looking boy who had kept Hannah standing a moment, in suspicion, before letting her in.—My son’s the man of the house now.—

  A house that smelled of stale spiced cooking. On the wall a travelling salesman’s Kahlil Gibran texts. But in the glass-fronted bookcase a surprising little library, not only the imitation-leather-bound mail-order classics usually to be found as a sign of hunger for knowledge, and not only the Marx, Lenin, Fanon, Gandhi and Nkrumah, Mandela and Biko always to be found as a sign of political self-education, but Kafka and D. H. Lawrence, she noticed in glimpses aside, while talking, talking, talking like that.

  She had been there once again. But that was after. It was when the house was invaded by laughter and music, all that it had been the first time thrust aside, as the furniture was for dancing. The loving state of being in which she had sat with the beautiful wife, the daughter, the son, was also thrust away, terrifyingly transformed into something else: passionate awareness of the ex-prisoner host. The first time he and she made love she had felt a strange threat of loss in the midst of joy, and had tried to explain it to herself by attempting to put it, in another way, to him. He didn’t really understand; but sexual love has the matchless advantage of the flesh as reassurance for anything, everything, for the moment. The body speaks and all is silenced.

  So everything in that house she remembered from that first day was cherished because it was part of him. It was all she had of that part of him she could not really know, which she had transformed into a lover. It was what both he and she discounted between them, in her room.

  She would have liked to be the older confidante of the girl (looked as if she needed someone) and the adult-who-is-not-a-parent, so useful to an adolescent, in the life of the boy, his son. Even the pseudo-philosophy of the cheap framed texts became tender evidence of the qualities of the man who had left behind him fake consolations of uplift taken by the powerless and poor. She put away for safe-keeping her first day’s vision of his house like a lock of hair from the head of the child that has become the man.

  It’s part of the commonplace strategy of adultery to appear in company where both wife and mistress are present. It’s accepted as merely a way of hiding, by displaying there’s nothing to hide. But Sonny was so inexperienced, he did not know how to suppress, in himself, the real urge discovered to underlie such confrontations. He learned they were not brought about by any social inevitability it would look suspicious to avoid; they were not arranged to reassure and protect Aila or to ensure that if he and Hannah were by chance to be seen in public together it would appear an innocent encounter within a mutual political circle. Giving his view on how to get the boycotting youth back into school without compromising their political clout, he had the attention of a lawyer and two educationists, comrades on the National Education Crisis Committee, when somewhere behind him he heard mingled in group conversation the two voices he knew best in the world. Two birds singing in his emotion: he did not hear the chatter of the other women, the cheeping of sparrows. He became eloquent, his nostrils round with conviction, he had never expressed himself more forcefully than while, the first time, instead of keeping the two women fastidiously apart within him, he possessed both at once. The exaltation was the reverse of his fear of Aila finding out.

  Later, alone, desolated, shamed, he understood. He sought, even contrived, ways of appearing with his wife in houses where his other woman would be a guest.

  The sexual excitement of bringing the two women together entered him as a tincture, curling cloudy in a glass of water.

  She reminds me of pig. Our ancestors didn’t eat pig.

  A few bright hairs look like filaments of glass embedded in the pink flesh round her mouth.

  I have terrible thoughts. About her. About my father with her. I imagine them …could I ever think of my mother like that! I’m sick with myself. What he’s made me think about.

  What’d he send me there for? I keep going over the place. What I saw, what he made me see. Her pants and bras on the radiator. The bed, right there where you walk in. Don’t they know about privacy? People like her, so dedicated to our freedom, worming their way to get to see our prisoners, standing on our doorsteps. I should never have let her pass. Stupid kid that I was. The man of the house. They bring you up to be polite and then put you in situations they didn’t tell you could ever happen.

  What did he send me there for? I keep thinking about it and as I change, get older—every month makes a difference when you’re young and finding out about yourself—my answers change. Forbidden pig. Pink pig. I’ve thought what he wanted was to mix me up in it. What men feel. It suits him, now, to think of me as a man like himself. Who wants to fuck. Who feels guilty about it; he counts on me, a kid like me, being guilty of having these mad wild feelings. When I was really a kid he told me just the opposite: I tried to hide the signs of masturbation on my underpants and he told me, son, there’s nothing to feel guilty about—what I did to myself was natural. Now he wants me to see her, see what he enjoys and be guilty with him of what he feels because I understand it in myself. A bond. Tied. Father and son more like good buddies.

  That’s what I’ve thought.

  And then again—I’ve come to understand something else. I think I have. It’s come to me from my body, yes. (If he believed I’d learn from my own body, he’s right, there.) I think what he wants is to show off his virility. To me. The proof of his virility. That clumsy blonde. The bed where he does it, the highbrow music he’s doing it to, the show-off picture on the wall he sees while he’s doing it, the underwear she takes off those places where he can touch her—he, not me, not me. (Not I—he would correct me.) He sent me to her to show me it’s not my turn yet. He’s not moving aside, off women’s bodies, for me. I needn’t think, because I’m tall as he is and I’ve got the same things between my legs he’s got, and (the tannies don’t let me forget it) I’m growing up ‘handsome as he is’, I haven’t even been let off those bloody thick eyebrows that make his eyes so sexy—I shouldn’t think he needs to give over to me. The old bull still owns the cows, he’s still capable of serving his harem, my mother and his blonde.

  I don’t think my father knows any of these things about himself. Only I know, only I.

  When the schoolteacher led the children across th
e veld he did so on his own impulse and responsibility. That naïvety was no longer possible.—There’s no freedom in working for freedom. —He could say it to Hannah, and they both laughed. There was pride and scepticism in the laughter. You couldn’t say such things to Aila; between Aila and him was the old habit of simple reverence for living useful lives. He had to keep it up, as other things had to be kept up, before her. Why, when he was in prison she evidently had not disturbed her habits, somehow carried on as if nothing had happened; now she treated his way of life—its structures clandestine, its activities directed by Committees and Desks, its dangers constant—as if he had been still the schoolmaster and received a posting to a new school. An enemy of the State: and when he told her the few things about his work he could tell her (he had to talk to her about something, had to find something to drive away the silence between Aila and him) she listened consideringly as she had to the tales of those petty problems he used to have teaching school, when they lived in the ghetto outside Benoni-son-of-sorrow, first married.

  He took part in policy decisions somewhere below the highest level and thereafter, in a group where he himself participated in allocation of the activities of others, was in turn given his orders. How much any one should be exposed was always a worried calculation based on the current number of comrades detained or serving prison sentences—how many, outside, could be spared. There were agonized decisions about who should appear where, when public occasions demanded a presence if the movement were to retain its popular power. He was no Tutu or Boesak or Chikane, and he could have been blacker, but as one of the best speakers, bloodied by prison, he had to be used only where he would be most effective with least risk. But who could calculate risk? Something to smile over, again, with Hannah. The black ghettos were army encampments and police dogs with their gun-carrying handlers replaced white ladies with poodles in the shopping malls. The headquarters of trade unions and militant church organizations were tramped through regularly by raiding police. Some were mysteriously blown up or burned. At road-blocks around the city armoured cars stood and every black driver was flagged down and searched. As the schools boycott combined with rent boycotts proved exceptionally effective, taking whole communities out of government control, Sonny was used mostly on occasions when someone from the blacks’ National Education Crisis Committee was needed to attack the State education system. At university campuses and ghetto congresses his endearing middle name no longer appeared on posters—he was billed anonymously as ‘a prominent educationist’. At least the police would not have previous knowledge of his arrival on a public platform, if they were planning to pick him up.

  But there were times when an event often—and best—cohered hastily, before the proposed gathering could be banned. The call for a speaker would come when there was no choice but to send whoever was available in the area.

  Sonny told them both. Aila and Hannah.

  He mentioned the black township graveyard ceremony at home, and when he told his wife, his daughter was there—she didn’t appear for weeks and then suddenly would come in through the kitchen door at some odd hour. She sat eating her cornflakes, the good little girl. The boy avoided meals with him; Sunday breakfast was one of them.

  He was confusedly distracted at the sight of his Baby, where she used to be, in her place. As if in sudden disjuncture everything was back where once it was. But his girl was wearing a black satin blouse creased under the arms and the unnecessary paint round her eyes (they were striking enough already) darkened sleep-crumbs at the corners—she had more likely been out all night rather than have got up early to drop in for breakfast at her old home. A bile of distress rose and was swallowed. No time to deal with that; no right time ever, now.

  —Where’s that place, Daddy?—

  Before he could say, Aila turned her head from the gush of water filling the kettle.—The other side of Pretoria. North.—

  —Oh there. But you’ll never get in. The army’s all round.—He saw that Aila was making fresh tea. She always filled the kettle with cold water when making tea, she would never boil up what was already hot.—I’ll have what’s in the pot. I’ve no time.—

  —Since when are you a priest, my dear pa-pa.– Coquetry was inborn, for his Baby, even—and since she was a baby—when addressing her father.—Anyway, you’re unique, they’ll recognize you in your disguise of cassock and whatnot. Your eyebrows! Shall I pluck your eyebrows? Daddy? Yes!—She jumped up and rushed over to him with fingers extended like pincers.

  —Don’t be silly, I’m not going to be disguised as anything.—

  The girl’s playful threat turned into an embrace, her arm hooked round her father’s neck. They were laughing, protesting to each other, and then abruptly stopped; she kissed him fiercely on his cheek. He felt her jaw jar against the bone.

  —It’s the ‘cleansing of the graves’ of the nine youngsters who were shot by the police last week outside Jubilee Hall. They were buried yesterday. The street committees have asked for some kind of oration. The kids were comrades.—

  As he said ‘oration’ the boy came in, after all. In the glance of greeting he gave his son he felt a tic of embarrassment, as if he had been caught out quoting Shakespeare as he used to do to give the boy the freedom, at least, of great art.

  They sat together round the table in the breakfast nook Sonny had built with Will’s help, as they had made things together back in Benoni; Saturday shopping, the love of a schoolteacher for a virgin, the happiness of the first Baby and then the son named for genius—all this was pressing hard against their thighs. Aila rose and slid into her place again with the grace that did not brush against cup or cloth, fetching yogurt and replenishing margarine. Baby was recounting the highly embellished story of the driving test she had just taken, and tried to rile her brother into the old exchange of sibling insults.

  —Oh I’m perfectly confident. I even drove a truck while I was still on my learner’s. You know that? The only thing that bugs me is the behaviour of you barbarians on your souped-up bikes, rushing out of nowhere. You think just by keeping your lights on everyone’s got to pull out of your way as if you were the fire engine—I don’t know why Dad ever gave in to your nagging for one of these things, honestly, Will.—

  He hesitated, choosing an apple.—I never asked for it.—

  There was warning in her big, kohl-smeared eyes as he looked up fully at her, though she quickly laughed:—Oh no, I’ll bet you never! Never dreamt of asking! Never entered your curly head, brother of mine!—

  Jars and cups passed warm from hand to hand, a headline was read out by someone, the mother arranged with the son to do an errand for her, the chitter of china, crunch of knives through toast and splutter of poured tea linked the ellipses of breakfast remarks. All had been rehearsed countless times. It was not really happening; an echo, a formula being followed. The inconsequential talk was contained in the silence between them that all gathered there heard.

  Sonny had said he was in a hurry, in order to get away before the boy appeared. He had to bear out the lie. He rose from the table but Aila got up when he did and left the kitchen before him.

  —Ciao, Will.—

  Goodbye, he said. The boy always took care to make Sonny feel his son wanted him to be imprisoned again: something to put a stop to him. Farewell. Never come back.

  The lovely girl had wiped her eyes clean with her mother’s dishcloth, and now was quite unblemished by whatever her night had been.—Be careful, Daddy. Here—put this down for me.—She took a rose, grown in Aila’s garden, out of the vase on the breakfast table.

  He had Baby’s flower in his hand when Aila met him in the passage with a zipped carryall. He knew what was in it. Toothbrush and paste, towel, soap, pyjamas, change of socks and underpants, sweater. The essentials you were allowed to pack up if you were lucky enough to be taken into detention from home and not while speaking at the cleansing of the graves. She had been gone from the kitchen less than a minute. —How did you do that?—r />
  —I keep it ready.—She was smiling. She shrugged as if to discount herself, excuse some interference.

  —It’s not necessary. I’ll be all right.—

  She stood there. She licked her lips. Stood there.

  He picked up the bag in the hand in which he held the flower.—Baby’s, to put on the graves.—He looked about, out of habit, for the briefcase, took it in the other hand, and she opened the front door for him.

  Not ciao, no goodbye.—Don’t worry, Aila.—

  —I’ll be there. I’ll hear you. I was going with the DPSC2 and Black Sash,3 anyway.—

  He had time for breakfast, with Hannah. A cup of coffee and half a slice of her toast spread with fish-paste—Because I taste of it already.—She was still in the outsize T-shirt in which she slept, and the slight hollow that trembled along the underside of her soft-fleshed arm from armpit to elbow, as she lifted it about the objects on the table, drew his eye and made him lean over and taste her mouth for himself. Her breasts and belly were so near under the cotton rag that the flesh warmed his hand as if it were held before a sleepy fire.

  —Couldn’t you come with me?—

  She took deep, smiling breaths to regain control of herself. —Better not, don’t you think?—

  —Of course. Maybe I can give you a lift back. You’ll find some excuse.—

  The treat of spending the short journey together was tempting; she smiled and played with his hand, which recently she had swabbed with cerise water-colour and imprinted on a sheet of paper now pinned to the wall. –No. Unless I get them to drop me off in Pretoria, that I could do—and we’d meet somewhere?—