Authors: Nadine Gordimer
My Son's Story (2 page)
Sonny and his wife did not covet âGranada' or âVersailles'; with an understanding of Shakespeare there comes a release from the gullibility that makes you prey to the great shopkeeper who runs the world, and would sell you cheap to illusion. (False valuesâbut that was what he was to call them only later.) Yet the couple were not set apart in any outward way from the crowd of their kind who came into the town every Saturday to buy from the white people. With their children by the hand, they passed the town's two cinemas without particular awareness that they had never entered, could not enter. When Sonny's family was hungry he bought chips from the Greek's shop and he and Aila carefully put the crumpled paper, wet with vinegar, into the municipal trash baskets when the children had finished eating as they walked; the Greek had a few tables set out with flyspotted artificial flowers and tomato sauce bottles, at which people could be served, but not this family. Ifâas alwaysâthe children needed to go to the lavatory, the parents trotted them off down to the railway station, where there were the only
toilets provided for their kind, although the department store had a cloakroom for the use of other customers. As some lordly wild animal marks the boundaries of his hunting and mating ground which no other may cross, it was as if the municipality left some warning odour, scent of immutable authority, where the Saturday people were not to transgress. And they read the scent; they recognized it always, it had always been there. There was no need for notices spelling it out; there were only a few of these in the town, on public benches, for example. There was none at the library; but no-one would have pretended not to know what there was to know about that building from which the scent came, disguised this time as the smell of books, the cool must of yellowing paper, scuffed leather, and the woodfragrance absorbed from the shelves where they were held, as brandy takes flavour from the casks in which it matures.
toilets provided for their kind, although the department store had a cloakroom for the use of other customers. As some lordly wild animal marks the boundaries of his hunting and mating ground which no other may cross, it was as if the municipality left some warning odour, scent of immutable authority, where the Saturday people were not to transgress. And they read the scent; they recognized it always, it had always been there. There was no need for notices spelling it out; there were only a few of these in the town, on public benches, for example. There was none at the library; but no-one would have pretended not to know what there was to know about that building from which the scent came, disguised this time as the smell of books, the cool must of yellowing paper, scuffed leather, and the woodfragrance absorbed from the shelves where they were held, as brandy takes flavour from the casks in which it matures.
The lover of Shakespeare never had the right to enter the municipal library and so did not so much as think about it while white people came out before him with books under their arms; he did not recognize what the building represented for him, with its municipal coat of arms and motto above the pillared entrance: CARPE DIEM.
She is blonde, my father's woman. Of course. What else would she be? How else would he be caught, this man who has travelled so far from all the humble traps of our kind, drink, glue-sniffing, wife-beating, loud-mouthed capering, obsequious bumming (please my master ag please my baas), and all the sophisticated traps of lackeyism, corruption, nepotism, that wait for men who take privilege at the expense of the lives of others, and of their own self-respect. Self-respect! It's been his religion, his godhead. It's never failed him, when he wanted to know what course to take next: his inner signpost, his touchstone. Do what will enable you to keep your self-respect. That is the wisdom he has offered to usâmy sister and me. It came with the warm flow of assurance that floods you when you receive something to live by whose proof is there in the person of the donor. If someone whose self-respect has demanded and received so much from himâloss of the work he was dedicated to, transformation from contemplative privacy to public activity, speechifying, imprisonment and trialâif
he
is to be caught of
course it's going to be by the most vulgar, commonplace, shopworn of sticky traps, fit for a dirty fly that comes into the kitchen to eat our food and shit on it at the same time.
he
is to be caught of
course it's going to be by the most vulgar, commonplace, shopworn of sticky traps, fit for a dirty fly that comes into the kitchen to eat our food and shit on it at the same time.
Of course she is blonde. The wet dreams I have, a schoolboy who's never slept with a woman, are blonde. It's an infection brought to us by the laws that have decided what we are, and what they areâthe blonde ones. It turns out that all of us are carriers, as people may have in their bloodstreams a disease that may or may not manifest itself in them but will be passed on; it has come to him in spite of all he has emancipated himself from so admirablyâoh yes, I did, I do admire my father. People talk of someone âcoming down' with a fever; he's come down with this; to this.
Of course âwe 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 âgrey 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 âbad judge', a secret member of the
Broederbond.
She was showingâbut not showing off, she was all humility before our family's troubleâinside 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 standardâthe selfrespectâshe kept up, was the one to supply support and encouragement.
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 âbad judge', a secret member of the
Broederbond.
She was showingâbut not showing off, she was all humility before our family's troubleâinside 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 standardâthe selfrespectâshe 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 pocketsâcouldn'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.
weep; the sound is horrible, I suppose because it's his voice that's breaking.
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The schoolteacher had a yearningâhe 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 âenriched his mind'âas 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, libraryâthe townâwhite. He could not belong to whatever cultural circles the town hadâthe 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 transcendenceâa 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.
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 transcendenceâa 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.
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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 âspeak 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 themselvesâpowerlessâwho nevertheless had the special kind of self-respect (yes, that again) that makes it possible to influence othersâtake 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 usâhis family. That was it; to give came to him naturally, as it came to them to take.
things for other people the way he did things for usâhis 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 neighbours 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 togetherâmy 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 himselfâthere 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.
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 wereâmy 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 nightâno school next dayâand 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 sisterânot 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 âhe' 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'tâdon'tâpretend to understand how. It was between them, and will not be available to any child of theirs, ever.
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'tâdon'tâpretend to understand how. It was between them, and will not be available to any child of theirs, ever.
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