My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online

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.
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    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.
    â€”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.—
    â€”Not for them, for the children.—
    â€”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