None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer Read Free Book Online Page A

assurances. As she saw him to the door, a rush of rejection of fears swept her, she walked out with him into the street, they were ambling together in full view of neighbours, police, anybody who might be witnessing them from watching houses, the eyes of windows, crossing and rounding the corner in the middle of the street where they could not fail to be seen, arm in arm to where, for discretion so that it would not mark her house, he had left a car. And there they embraced goodbye: the open stare of the street fixed on them.
    If no one finds out, it’s as if it never took place.
    It was not the first time Vera had experienced something she never revealed. Only five years of silence had passed this time; but Ivan was more than forty years old. So it comes aboutthat the precedent of lying by omission becomes a facility that serves a political purpose just as well.
    Sibongile and Didymus Maqoma regained their names when they came back. In exile they had had code names; there would always be many people in the outside world who would know them by no other. Addressed by these names, they would react—answer—to them as they would to the names given them, attached as an umbilical cord to the location outside a coalmining town (Sibongile, daughter of a Zulu mother and Sotho father) and the steep hut village folded in maritime hills (Didymus, in the Transkei) where they were born and first answered to a name at all.
    They did not go back to the little house where they were young—probably a slum by now, with the crush of people doubling-and tripling-up for somewhere to live—unthinkable to live in Chiawelo, anyway. They spent the first few weeks in a Hillbrow hotel that had been taken over as a reception centre for returning exiles. It had been a drinking-place for working-class white toughs and their women, and the cheap orange carpeting was stained with beer and pitted with cigarette burns. Stretched tapes on the music diffusion system repeated themselves through twenty-four hours, day and night. Sibongile stripped the beds to look for vermin. She felt them on her skin, sleepless, although they were not there.
    The plane-loads of returning exiles who were arriving every few days were awaited at the airport by chanting and dancing crowds; when they came through the automatic doors that closed behind them on the old longing for home, when they emerged pushing squeaking chariots charged with the evidence of far places, carrying airport store giant teddy-bears, blind with excitementin the glare of recognition—not, at once, of who they were individually but of what they stood for, the victory of return—a swell of women’s ululating voices buffeted them into the wrestle of joyous arms. Children seen for the first time were tossed from hands to shoulders, welcome banners were trampled, flowers waved, bull-horns sounded, the hugging, capering procession of transit to repossession, life regained, there outside the airport terminal, was a carnival beyond belief it would ever be possible to celebrate. Home: that quiet word: a spectacle, a theatre, a pyrotechnic display of emotion for those who come from wars, banishment, exile, who have forgotten what home was, or suffered not being able to forget.
    The Maqomas of course had not come on one of the crowded charter flights and their reception was less flamboyant though no less emotional. Didymus was a veteran of the inner circle in exile, one who for all those years had been involved in international missions and certain other important activities, and they were met by comrades equal to him in rank within the internal organization. A car was waiting for them, driven by one of the young returned Freedom Fighters now deployed as Security men. Home. They slept, that first night, in what used to be a forbidden white suburb at the house that had been acquired for one of the most important leaders. But it was understood they could not stay; the room would be needed