Read None to Accompany Me Online
Authors: Nadine Gordimer
None to Accompany Me
ACCOMPANY ME
Nadine Gordimer
For Roland Cassirer
We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
âMARCEL PROUST
â¢
None to accompany me on this path: Nightfall in Autumn.
âBASH
Å
seventeenth-century Japanese poet
Baggage
Â
And who was that?
There's always someone nobody remembers. In the group photograph only those who have become prominent or infamous or whose faces may be traced back through experiences lived in common occupy that space and time, flattened glossily.
Who could it have been? The dangling hands and the pair of feet neatly aligned for the camera, the half-smile of profile turned to the personage who was to become the centre of the preserved moment, the single image developed to a higher intensity; on the edge of this focus there's an appendage, might as well trim it off because, in the recognition and specific memory the photograph arouses, the peripheral figure was never present.
But if someone were to come alongâwait!âand recognize the one whom nobody remembers, immediately another reading of the photograph would be developed. Something else, some other meaning would be there, the presence of what was taken on, along the way, then. Something secret, perhaps. Caught so insignificantly.
Vera Stark, lawyer-trained and with the impulse to order that brings tidiness with ageing, came upon a photograph she
had long thought thrown out with all she had discarded in fresh starts over the years. But it wasn't any print she had overlooked. It was the photograph she had sent to her first husband in his officers' quarters in Egypt during the warâtheir war, the definitive war, not those following it which spawn without the resolution of victory parades. He must have kept the photograph. Must have brought it back in his kit. It was a postcardâthe postcardâshe had sent when on a trip to the mountains; a photograph of the little group of friends who made up the holiday party. What she had written on the back (turning it over now, the lifting of a stone) was the usual telegraphic few lines scribbled while buying stampsâthe weather perfect, she was climbing, walking miles a day, swimming in clear pools, the hotel was as he would remember it but rather run-down. Best wishes from this one and thatâfor those linking arms were their mutual friends, there was only one new face: a man on her left, a circle round his head. He was identified by name in a line squeezed vertically alongside her account of the weather.
What was written on the back of the photograph was not her message. Her message was the inked ring round the face of the stranger: this is the image of the man who is my lover. I am in love with him, I'm sleeping with this man standing beside me; there, I've been open with you.
Her husband had read only the text on the back. When he came home he did not understand it was not to be to her. She defended herself, amazed, again and again: âI showed you, I ringed his photograph next to me. I thought at least we knew each other well enough ⦠How could you not understand! You just refused to understand.â
But yes, he must have brought it back in all innocence with his other souvenir knick-knacks, the evidence of his war, brought it back and here it was, somehow hadn't been torn up
or thrown away when they divided their possessions in the practical processes of parting in divorce. After forty-five years she was looking at the photograph again and seeing there in its existence, come back to her and lying on a shelf under some old record sleeves, that it was true: the existence of his innocence, for ever.
Vera and Bennet Stark gave a party on one of their wedding anniversaries, the year the prisons opened. It was a season for celebration; sports club delegations, mothers' unions and herded schoolchildren stood around Nelson Mandela's old Soweto cottage queueing to embrace him, while foreign diplomats presented themselves to be filmed clasping his hand. The Starks have been married so long they don't usually make an occasion of the recurrent day, but sometimes it suggested an opportunity to repay invitations, discharge all we owe in one go, as Vera says, and on this year of all years it seemed a good excuse to go further than that: to let themselves and their friends indulge a little in the euphoria they knew couldn't last, but that they were entitled to enjoy now when, after decades when they had worked towards it without success, change suddenly emerged, alive, from entombment. There were her Legal Foundation colleagues, of course; and white men and women who had been active in campaigns against detention without trial, forced removals of communities, franchise that excluded blacks; student leaders, ganged up under a tree in the garden drinking beer from cans, who had supported striking workers; a couple of black militant clergymen and an Afrikaner dominee excommunicated for his heresy in condemning segregation; a black doctor who hid and treated young militants injured in street battles with the police and army; black community leaders who had led boycotts; one or two of
the white eternals from the street meetings of the old Communist Party, from the passive resistance campaigns of the Fifties and rallies of the Congress Alliance, the committees of any and every front organization during the period of bannings, who had survived many guises. And there were some missing. Those who were Underground were not convinced it was safe to come up, yet. Negotiations with the Government on indemnity for political activists were not decisive. One of their number made a surprise appearanceâa late-night cabaret turn bursting into the company in a purple-and-yellow flowered shirt, gleeful under the peak of a black leather cap. There were wrestling embraces and shoulder-punching bonhomie from his brothers-in-arms Above Ground, and the hostess reacted as she used to when she didn't know how to show her son how moved she was by the pleasure of having him home from boarding schoolâshe brought her best offerings of food and drink.
The occasion was already marked by the presence of that sonâIvan, on a visit from London, where he had made his way to become a successful banker. With his auraâhe wore what Jermyn Street called leisure clothes, silky suede lumber jacket, Liberty cravat and tasselled loafersâhe seemed an unacknowledged yet defensive embarrassment to his mother (his father never showed his feelings, anyway) in the illusion that he was one of the colleagues and comrades; that coming home meant the matter of taking a plane. If the party was supposed to be for him as well as to celebrate an enduring marriage (and who would remember, of that extraordinary era, what occasioned what) it became a clandestine welcome for one of his mother's mysterious friends. Music began to shake the walls and billow out into the garden; political argument, drinking and dancing went on until three in the morning. Ivan danced wildly, laughing, with his mother; it was as if their resemblance to one another
were a shared source between them. When the man who had come up from Underground was found to have gone as he had come, from where and to where, no one would ask, it was as if the music stopped abruptly. He left a strange hollow silence behind; the echo chamber of all those years, now closing, silence of prisons, of disappearance, of exile, and for some, death. Over? The guests driving away to sleep, the hosts collecting dirty glasses, could not answer themselves.
Vera opened the door to a ring at ten o'clock at nightâno fear of muggings back in those days of the Forties. He stood, still in his uniform, come to see if he could find some keys missing in the possessions he had packed up and taken away to the hotel where he was living. âCan't lock my suitcases, damn nuisance as everything's still lying about stored here and there.â He didn't have to apologize for turning up unannounced at that hour because, of course, he knew her habits, she stayed up late, sometimes even after he had gone to bed he used to wake from first sleep and feel her sole sliding down his naked leg.
She kept him standing a few moments in the doorway as if he were a travelling salesman, and then stalked before him into their old living-room, now hers. He rummaged through the desk; she stood looking on. He might have been a plumber mending a pipe. She made a few offhand, low-voiced suggestions of where the keys might be. He had come prepared to meet, in the civilized way already established between the three of them, her lover with the thick smooth black hair like the coat of some animal, a panther, maybe, and the clear ridged outline of turned-down lipsâhow was it he hadn't taken notice of these striking features in a photograph? Poor stupid trusting bastard that he was! But the lover wasn't there, or he hadn't come âhome' yet.
âThey just might be in the (he didn't say âmy') old tallboy in the bedroomâI left some stuff I thought you might still want. D'you mind if I go in?â
He turned to her politely.
Suddenly she peaked the stiff fingers of her hands in a V over her mouth and couldn't suppress snorts of laughter.
He smiled, the smile broadening, sending ease between them like circles from the broken surface of water.
They entered together. She behaved as if their bed weren't there, walking past it as something she didn't recognize, and pulling out drawers for him. âI haven't got round to going through thisâ
He held up papers. âYour old school reports, believe it or not. I thought you might want to keep them.â
âGood god, what for? I'm sure I would have thrown them in the bin, it must have been you who stuck them away.â
She made a gesture of refusal, not interested.
âMaybe I did rescue them from you some time. You still want to become a lawyer?â
Her chin jerked vigorously towards her sternum, with the vehemence of a child whose determination is beyond words. And at once she casually deflected this intrusion of past confidences. âWhy are you still in that outfit?â
âNot yet demobilized.â
Perhaps the remark was not so casual; a subconscious rebuttal of unease she had never admitted to herselfââthat outfit', referred to as if it were some form of affected fancy dress, had never been taken on by her civilian lover.
There grew between them the silence of nothing left to say. Nothing of their boy-girl love affair, their clumsy assumption of adulthood together, when she was seventeen, in a marriage interrupted by war. Absently he took off to toss to a chair the
jacket with its epaulettes and insignia, its strip of campaign ribbons, and got down on his hunkers, searching through the lowest drawers of the piece of furniture. She opened a window to establish that the closeness in the room was lack of air.
Arms crossed, she stood there, watching as he set aside papers in sorted piles, and his back with its muscles moving under the stretched cloth of the shirt, the unawareness of her expressed in the nape grained with sunburn and clipped pale hair bared before her, the warmth of the flesh releasing the smell of a clean, creased shirtâshe could not believe the sensation this was bringing her. She fled from it to the kitchen and poured two glasses of fruit juice, but as she was lifting the tray went to the living-room, took a bottle of whisky, came back to the kitchen and in two fresh glasses poured the liquor slowly over ice. She returned to the bedroom with harmless words ready: I think you need a drink. But she approached that warm and redolent back, forgotten, familiar, discovered anew, and touched the shoulder with the hand that held a glass. He turned at the nudge and lifted eyebrows in acknowledgement of the welcome drink, getting to his feet with weight supported on one palm.