My Son's Story Read Free Page A

prepared my expression, the way I would stand to confront the police come to search the house once again. But it was a blonde woman with the naked face and apologetic, presumptuous familiarity, in her smile, of people who come to help. It was her job; she was the representative of an international human rights organization sent to monitor political detentions and trials, and to assist people like my father and their families. We didn’t need groceries, my school fees were paid; my mother and Baby (after school) were both working and there was no rent owed because when we moved to the city my father had bought that house in what later was called a ‘grey area’ where people of our kind defied the law and settled in among whites.
    So we didn’t need her. She sat on the edge of our sofa and drank tea and offered what is known as moral support. She
talked about the probability of my father being brought to trial, the iniquity of the likely charges, the foreboding Defence lawyers always had, in such cases, that one would get a ‘bad judge’, a secret member of the Broederbond. She was showing—but not showing off, she was all humility before our family’s trouble—inside knowledge she must have gathered from interviews with the lawyers and furtive exchanges in court with the accused in trials she had already attended, exchanges made across the barrier between the public gallery and the dock during the judge’s tea recess. She was so intense it seemed my quiet mother, her hair groomed and elegant legs neatly crossed as if her husband were there to approve of the standard—the selfrespect—she kept up, was the one to supply support and encouragement.
    Of course I know her. That broad pink expanse of face they have, where the features don’t appear surely drawn as ours are, our dark lips, our abundant, glossy dark lashes and eyebrows, the shadows that give depth to the contours of our nostrils. Pinkish and white-downy-blurred; her pink, unpainted lips, the embroidered blouse over some sort of shapeless soft cushion (it dented when she moved) that must be her breasts, the long denim skirt with its guerrilla military pockets—couldn’t she make up her mind whether she wanted to look as if she’d just come from a garden party or a Freedom Fighters’ hide in the bush? Everything undefined; except the eyes. Blue, of course. Not very large and like the dabs filled in with brilliant colour on an otherwise unfinished sketch.
    And even if I hadn’t known her, I could have put her together like those composite drawings of wanted criminals you see in the papers, an identikit. The schoolboy’s wet dream. My father’s woman. But I had no voluptuous fantasy that night. I woke up in the dark. It’s hard for an adolescent boy to allow himself to
weep; the sound is horrible, I suppose because it’s his voice that’s breaking.
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    The schoolteacher had a yearning—he thought it was to improve himself. This was not in conflict with usefulness. He could only improve the quality of life for the school, for the community across the veld from the town, if he himself ‘enriched his mind’—as he thought of it. He could not belong to whatever political debate there was in the town. Not that that was much loss, he was aware, since from accounts he read in the local paper it consisted of squabbles for control of the municipal council and the office of mayor between two groups prejudiced against each other, the Afrikaans-speaking and the English-speaking, with common purpose principally in keeping their jobs, benches, cinemas, library—the town—white. He could not belong to whatever cultural circles the town had—the amateur players’ theatre, the chamber music society started by German Jewish refugees who had arrived during the war, bringing culture as well as the brewing of good coffee to a mining town that knew only Gilbert and