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Authors: Nadine Gordimer

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BOOK: My Son's Story
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No wonder parents wanted removed from the school a teacher, one of their own kind, who led their children over there.
What made him allow himself to be seen with his woman in a public place? What made him go with her to that cinema, in a smart complex of underground shops and restaurants, moving stairways and piped music? Well, what made me go there: I thought no-one'd see me. No-one would know me. A suburb where well-off white people lived, always had lived; at a cheap cinema in one of the grey areas where we'd moved in there'd be bound to be people who would have recognized me. Recognized him. Seen him with her.
So we both went across the city, tried to get lost in foreign territory, deceiving each other. Though I flattered myself; he certainly didn't have me in mind as I, fifteen, had
him
, the parent, in mind when I bunked study leave that afternoon. Do you ever forget about them, the parents, for a moment? They are always there in the hesitations—whether you will obey or defy—the opinions—where did you get them from?—that decide what you're doing. Because even while you defy the parents, deceive them, you believe in them.
And then there he was. What are you going to see? he said. But I had seen. He kept his distance from me because he thought he must smell of her arm and shoulder pressed against his. Perhaps he'd been touching her in the dark. His hand worming up her sleeve and feeling her breast. We try it with girls at parties when someone turns off the lights.
He had shown me something I should never have been shown.
I came into the kitchen for supper when the others were already at table. I had stopped outside the door before I went in, my whole body shying away. He was there in his usual place, as if he were my father again, not the man with his blonde woman in the foyer of the cinema. I slid into my place beside my sister on the bench he had made himself—and I had helped him—when he was assembling the do-it-yourself ‘breakfast nook' unit for my mother. In the ease of the family presence we often didn't actually greet each other at meals; it would have been like talking to oneself. So I didn't have to speak. He was shaking the salt cellar over his food, I saw his hand and I did not have to see his face. My mother was talking softly, commenting on something or other Baby must have mentioned, as she went between stove and table as a bird flies back and forth with food to drop into the open beaks of her young.—Sit down and eat. He can help himself.—My father spoke of me like that; he spoke with gentle consideration to my mother. Then I looked up at him, perhaps he was willing me to do so. We saw each other again.
Nothing happened; as if nothing had happened. My mother said I looked tired.—I think he ought to be taking Sanatogen.—
—Oh Aila, you don't believe that nonsense!—He was smiling at her.
—Well, everybody took it for exam nerves when I was at school. Will, won't you have a glass of milk? Don't you think he's done enough, he's been at it all day, Sonny, he should close his books and have an early night. Tell him.—Although my father was no longer a schoolteacher she kept the habit of referring to him as the expert in matters affecting our education. And those deeply-recessed eyes gazed at me across the table: —Now that's a good idea. Sleep's the best tonic. What's the subject you write next week?—
I spoke to him for the first time.—Biology. On Tuesday.—And so there was complicity between us, he drew me into it, as if he were not my father (a father would never do such a thing). And yet because he was my father how could I resist, how could I dare refuse him?
 
 
It might even have been that the principal protected the schoolteacher for some time. Conscience—the principal's own, that he didn't follow—or loyalty to his own kind against the power of the town's and the government's authority might have moved him; in the community there was no-one so determined to stay out of trouble that he would not secretly admire one who was not afraid to get into trouble. The schoolteacher did not lose his post during the period when the children were disrupting the school just as if they were really black.
But he had ventured outside the harmless activities of good works for which funds could be begged from the Rotarians and the Lions, and approved by them at their weekly lunches in the town's appointed hotel. People in communities like his own, in other areas of the Transvaal, got to hear of him—probably it was the newspaper photograph that started it. Proclamations in the
Government Gazette
were being enacted in these areas—
literally, as the script of a play is enacted by the voices and movements of players, by government trucks carting away people and their possessions and by bulldozers pushing over what had been their homes. Shopkeepers who were not really black but not white, either, were being moved out of the shops they had occupied for generations in the white towns. There were people like him in these communities, people who felt responsibility beyond their families, and they were eager to recruit anyone who showed a sign: he had marched across the veld; he was marked. Although no family was losing its home as yet in his community it was obvious he was the kind of man who would realize that all communities of his kind were in fact one and if that one were threatened by a white town this month or year, this one could be the next. He was approached to form a local committee, he was elected to a regional executive, he studied government white papers in the tin-trunk archives of township proclamations, and title deeds old people had kept; he stood on the creaking boards of a church hall and made his first speech.
He had stayed the children's hands when they picked up stones. But words, too, are stones. Now he had taken up the sling, another David among many singling themselves out to be marked—again, by the eyes of Goliath.
Unexpectedly, he proved to be one of the best speakers in the movement and at weekends was needed to address gatherings around the province. His name appeared on posters in dorps where they were scrawled over obscenely or torn down by local whites. ‘Sonny', in quotes, was printed between his first and surnames, in the lists of speakers, the childish appellation became a natural political advantage, stressing approachability and closeness to the people he would address. And when there were combined meetings with real blacks, his own dark skin,
in contrast with the lighter colouring of most of his kind, surely helped reduce superficial differences between those who were entirely black and those who had something of the white man in their veins. Colleagues, more politically sophisticated than he, saw the usefulness of these attributes. He himself was innocent of the fact that they could be used in any way; was only gratified that his years of reading—that individualistic, withdrawn preoccupation, as he was beginning to think of it—were being put directly to the use of the community in providing him with a vocabulary adequate to what needed to be said. Words came flying to his tongue from the roosts of his private pleasures. When he was told he was good he laughed and said embarrassedly that he was a teacher, a public speaker in the classroom every day of his working life.
The principal came to the teacher's house on a Saturday afternoon. Aila opened the door and in her face (the principal always had thought her beautiful, but in the way of one of those national costume dolls brought back from foreign countries, too typical) he saw such instant comprehension and dread that, having never ever dropped in, before, what he came out with was something ridiculous: I was just passing … She led him in, in silence. She went to fetch her husband from the back yard where for privacy, under the shelter of the grapevine he'd grown, he was in a meeting with his new associates. They saw her face. They rose quickly to their feet.
—No, not the police. The principal.—
The associates sat down again; one gave a gesture of relief, excusing the teacher for the interruption, as he himself might have given a pupil permission to leave the classroom.
The education department responsible for people of their kind had informed the principal that this teacher was to be dismissed.
The teacher smiled as one does at something expected, feared, and already dealt with at four in the mornings, lying quite still so as not to disturb the sleeper sharing the bed.
—Man, what can I do. I tried to stop it.—The principal's lower jaw jutted and pushed his lips and moustache up towards his nose; that comic grimace so familiar to his staff whenever he had something unpleasant to say and the muscles of his face sought to disguise his nervousness by assuming a fearsome aspect, the way a defenceless animal changes colour, or bristles.
—It's all right.—
—Sonny, I held them off … I told them, you're one of my best. I told how popular you are with the kids. What you've done for the school.—
But he had said the wrong thing again. It was exactly what the teacher had done for the school that had opened the dossier which had led to this: dismissal. In distress the principal unburdened himself of the worst.—You know … don't you …man, it's bad. The Department won't allow any other school to give you a post.—
Aila came in with a tray of tea.
She did not look up at either of the men and left without breaking the silence, for them.
Benoni—son of sorrow.
My father, who didn't have a university degree (unlike that woman he admires so much) used to have the facility for picking up incidental knowledge that only intelligent people whose formal education is limited, possess. He drew fragments of information to himself as I drew my mother's pins to the horseshoe magnet. One time he told me what the name of the town meant. I don't know where he learnt it. He said it was Hebrew.
I was born in that town, his son. I think now that this sorrow began when we left it. As long ago as that. Even before. When he had to stop being a teacher and his profession and his community work were no longer each an extension of the other, something that made him whole. Our family, whole.
They found a job for him in an Indian wholesaler's—the people of the committee against removals which was now his community work, taking him all over the place, speaking on platforms and attending meetings outside the community of our
streets, our area. He no longer had a profession; his profession had become the meetings, the speeches, the campaigns, the delegations to the authorities. The job—book-keeping or something of that kind he quickly taught himself—was not like teaching; it was a necessity that fed us and that was got through between taking the train to the city every morning and returning every evening. It had no place in our life. He did not bring it home, it was not present with us in the house as his being a teacher always had been. I was eleven years old; he went away every day and came back; I never saw that warehouse at the other end of the train journey. Men's and boys' clothing, he said: I had asked what was in it. Imagine him in cave after cave of shoes without feet, stacks and dangling strings of grey and brown felt hats, without heads or faces, he who had been surrounded by live children. He used to read to us at night, Baby and me, whenever there were no meetings. Baby didn't listen, she would go into the kitchen with her little radio. He had taught me to read when I was less than five years old but I still loved best to be read to by him. Sometimes I made him read to me from the book he himself was in the middle of, even though I didn't fully understand it. I learnt new words—he would interrupt himself and explain them, if I stopped him. When grownups asked the usual silly question put to children, Baby answered (depending on whether she was out to impress the visitor or be saucy) she would be ‘a doctor', ‘a beauty queen', and I said nothing. But he—my father—would say, ‘My son's going to be a writer'. The only time I had spoken for myself everyone laughed. I had been taken to the circus at Christmas and what I wanted to be when I grew up was a clown. Baby called out—bright little madam, everyone dubbed her—‘Because your feet's so big already!' My mother didn't want to see my feelings hurt and tried to change the derision to a rational objection. But clowns are sad, Will, she said.
The faces they draw over their faces, the big down-turned mouth and the little vertical points below and above the middle of each eye, that suggest shed tears. When he sat opposite me at supper that first night what face did he see on me. What face did he make me wear, from then on, to conceal him, what he was doing—my knowledge of it—from us: my mother, my sister, myself.
Perhaps if we had never left our area outside the small town it would never have happened? We should never have been there, at that cinema. She would never have found him, us—his blonde woman. I've thought of all the things that would have had to be avoided if I were not to have met my father at that cinema on an afternoon before the exams. I've lived them over in my mind because I did not know how to live now that I had met him, now that I had seen, not the movie I bunked swotting for, but what our own life is.
Although he worked in the city we had gone on living in our little house on the Reef for a time. My parents were paying off monthly instalments against the municipal loan with which they had bought it; my mother had her job running the crèche, for which eventually there had been granted a municipal subsidy by the town councillors. So we stayed where we were. Except for him, everything was in its place. The swing he had put up in the back yard when we were little, the kennel I'd helped him build for our Mickey, the dog he'd taken me to choose at the SPCA. While he was away with his committees and meetings at weekends my mother tried to do with us the things we all used to do together. And the last Sunday picnic before we left our home was in the winter. The last time; the end of winter. The veld had been fired to let the new growth come through, the sun burned off the night's frost, vaporized as a cool zest on the smell of ashes. A black landscape with only our mountains, the mine-dumps, yellow in the shadowless light. My
mother spread a sheet of plastic under our rug over the sharp black stubble that puffed like smoke under our feet and dirtied our socks. There were the things we liked to eat, naartjies whose brilliant orange skins Baby arranged in flower patterns on the blackness. Did he say, my daughter's going to be an artist? Because he was there. At that last picnic we had on our old patch of veld between the dumps, he was with us. He and I rambled off, I poking with a stick at every mound and hole for what treasures I did not know, and he showed me some, he discovered them for me; he always did. There was the skeleton of a fledgling caught by the fire, and he said we could take it home and wire it together. Then he spied for me the cast of a songololo thick as my middle finger, I held it up and could see the sky through it at the end of its tiny tunnel. Ice-blue sky, yellow dumps, black veld, like the primary colours of a flag. Our burnt-out picnic. She would never have known where to find us, there.
But when she came to the house in Johannesburg she had already found him. On her errands of mercy and justice she had visited the prison.
 
 
The ex-schoolteacher and his wife discussed the decision as they always had done everything, before they left the Reef town. They talked over months, as people who are very close to one another do, while carrying on the routine, whether of tasks or rest, that is the context of their common being. He was replacing the element in the kettle and she was cutting up vegetables for one of her delicious cheap dishes; she was in the bath and he came in and took up what he had been saying after Baby and Will had gone to bed; he and his wife were themselves in bed, had said goodnight and turned away, then slowly talk began again.
It was the biggest decision of their lives so far. Marriage? Love had led them so gently into that. To leave the place where they had courted, where the children had been born, where everybody knew them, knew she was Sonny's wife, Baby and Will were Sonny's children. Aila's silences said things like this.
—But what is this house? A hovel you've slaved away to make into something decent. How much longer can we have Baby sharing a room with her brother—she's a big girl, now. Paying the town council interest for another twenty-five years, thirty years, the never-never, we can't even give our kids a little room each. We don't have a vote for their council but they take our money for the privilege of living in this ghetto.—He had never before used this term to her, for their home. A changing vocabulary was accompanying the transformation of Sonny to ‘Sonny' the political personality defined by a middle, nickname. She knew he was leading her into a different life, patiently, step by step neither he nor she was sure she could follow. Her spoken contribution to their discussions was mostly questions. —But we won't find anything much better where we're going, will we? Where are we going to live?—None knew more than a member of the committee against removals about the shortage of shelter for people of their kind, decades– generations-long. ‘Housing' meant finding a curtained-off portion of a room, a garage, a tin lean-to. Then there was the matter of her job. Where would she find work in Johannesburg? Her kind of work. —I suppose I could do something else …get taken on in a factory.—Aila was referring to his connections with the clothing industry, he knew; it alarmed him. Unthinkable that through him Aila should sit bent over a machine. Jostle with factory girls in the street. He would find some solution, he would not show his alarm. Suddenly he saw exactly, precisely what she was doing, before him, at that moment: slicing green beans diagonally into sections of the same length, cutting yellow and
red bell peppers into slivers of identical thickness, all perishable, all beautiful as a mosaic. Aila's hands were not coarsened and dried by the housework she did; she went to bed with him every night with them creamed and in cotton gloves. The momentary distraction was not a distraction but a focus that thrust him, face down, in to the organic order and aesthetic discipline of Aila's life, that he was uprooting.
She sat in the bath soaping her neck. Her hair was piled up and tied out of the way in the old purple scarf that had its place on a hook among towels. He was already drawing breath to speak when he came through the door.—Why should you be ‘grateful' for the measly subsidy they give so you can run a crèche for them.—
—Not for them, for the children.—
—Ah no, no, for
them.
So they can sit in their council chamber and congratulate themselves on ‘upgrading' living conditions in the ghetto where our kids are brought up. Where we're supposed to live and die. The place where they confine us. Zoo. Leper colony. Asylum. It's humiliating to take from them, Aila. Let them have it.—
Her questions were never objections; they were the practical consequence of acceptance. She did not oppose the move. She was careful to present it to their children as something exciting and desirable. And the children were ready to quit with heartlessness their friends, their school, the four walls and small yard where they had played. Baby had the teenager's longing for the life she imagined existed in the city; Will cared only about taking the dog along. To Johannesburg, Johannesburg! Nobody asked exactly where. The husband, the father, was taking care of that.
When he knew where they were going to live the slither of the commuter train over the rails, taking him home from the warehouse, raced his bravado excitement, but as he walked
the familiar streets each night, back to the old house, through the greasy paper litter outside the fish and chips shop, past the liquor store with its iron bars and attendant drunk beggars, past the funeral parlour where the great shining black car stood always ready to take the poor grandly on a last ride, past his old school with its broken windows and the graffiti of freedom that still had not come—as he deserted this, he realized that a certain shelter was being given up, for the family. Shabby, degrading shelter—but nevertheless. He himself had the strength of a mission to arm him; his family—Aila—it would be different for them. So he calmed his euphoria before he told her. And it was not in front of the children.
—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?—
BOOK: My Son's Story
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