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

friends. The parents will avoid us …if we’re lucky, that’s all they’ll do. But then we don’t need them.—
    â€”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?—
    â€”Will’s got a chest cold.—
    â€”I’ll take it to him. Is he in bed?—

    He went off to tell his son about the tree-house they were going to build together. At their new home, high up, leaving the ghetto behind.
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    I don’t understand how Baby doesn’t know. Of course the fact that my father is away at all hours and sometimes for several days in itself doesn’t mean anything. Long before he went to prison he had to get used to leaving us alone a lot. We had to get used to it. He wasn’t a schoolteacher anymore, home every evening. He hasn’t worked in the warehouse since the end of the first year in Johannesburg because the committee needed him as a full-time organizer. And then the committee made alliances with the new black trade unions which had just been allowed to be formed, and I don’t know what else. All sorts of other people; groups active against the government. He was always one of those who wanted unity among them, always talking about it. When he was at home there were meetings sometimes the whole of Sunday, blacks, and our kind—lucky this house was built as a white people’s house and there was room for them to shut themselves away.
    And as soon as he came out of prison it started again—my father isn’t the man to be scared off his political work because he’s been jailed for it. Or he wasn’t the man; now I don’t know what he is. He goes out, away, and when he comes back, walks in, does the things he used to (pouring himself a glass of iced water from the fridge, hanging keys on one of the hooks he put up when we first moved here, asking us what sort of day we’ve had) he is acting. Performing what he used to be. Can’t my sister feel that? It isn’t something to see—the point is, it all looks the same, sounds the same. But the feeling. The body inside his same clothes. Whatever he touches, it’s with the hand
that has just left her . He smells different. Can’t my sister smell it? Not of scent or anything, it’s not that. I suppose he’d surely be too ashamed, he’s become too sly for that. His own smell—of his skin—that I remember from when I was little and he’d cuddle me, or that used to be there until quite lately, when we’d share the bathroom. It’s gone. I wouldn’t recognize him in the dark.
    Why should I be the one who had to know. Is it supposed to be some kind of a privilege? (What does he think!) She’s older than I am, why should she be running around happily with her boy-friends, going off to her commercial college with silver-painted nails and Freedom T-shirts, secretly smoking pot every day.
    I want to tell her, so she’ll know what it’s like to know. Why shouldn’t she. I’ve tried. I said to her, he’s different since he’s out of prison—I mean, do you think Dad’s all right? She laughed, impatient with me. She’s always in a hurry.—All right! Who wouldn’t be feeling good to get out! D’you expect him to be moping around like you?—
    And of course she doesn’t have anything to do with his body, any more, she’s touching boys. My mother doesn’t know about her either. I’m the only