Table Of ContentNONE TO
ACCOMPANY ME
Nadine Gordimer
For Roland Cassirer
We must never be afraid to go too far, for truth lies beyond.
—MARCEL PROUST
•
None to accompany me on this path: Nightfall in Autumn.
—BASH
Ō
seventeenth-century Japanese poet
Contents
Baggage
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Transit
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Arrivals
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Footnotes
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Baggage
Chapter 1
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 along—wait!—and 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 war—their 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
postcard—the postcard—she 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 stamps—the 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 that
—for 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: —I 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.—
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 appearance—a 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 school—she
brought her best offerings of food and drink.
The occasion was already marked by the presence of that son—Ivan, on a
visit from London, where he had made his way to become a successful banker.
With his aura—he wore what Jermyn Street called leisure clothes, silky suede
lumber jacket, Liberty cravat and tasselled loafers—he 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 night—no 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. —Can’t lock my suitcases, damn
nuisance as everything’s still lying about stored here and there.— He didn’t have
