My Son's Story Read Free Page B

Sullivan and a boiled chicory mixture. He could not belong to the Sunday bird-watchers’ group, although he was interested in nature and sometimes took his children by train to the zoo in the city on the weekly day when it was open to their kind, and into no-man’s-land, the stretch of veld between where his community lived and the town, to learn the habits of the mongoose and the dung-beetle, who lived there among the mine-dumps. He could not belong to the chess club (another initiative of the German Jews to create intellectual life in a town without any).
    He could not afford to buy many books. He thought he ought to have some guidance towards those that were important, which
might feed the yearning for whose satisfaction he was not sure what was really needed. Or rather what was wanting. He, too, enrolled in a correspondence course. He chose comparative literature and discovered Kafka to add to his Shakespearean source of transcendence—a way out of battered classrooms, the press of Saturday people, the promiscuity of thin-walled houses, and at the same time back into them again with a deeper sense of what the life in them might mean. Kafka named what he had no names for. The town whose walls were wandered around by the Saturday people was the Castle; the library whose doors he stood before were the gates of the law at which K. sat, year after year, always to be told he must wait for entry. The sin for which the schoolteacher’s kind were banished to a prescribed area, proscribed in everything they did, procreating, being born, dying, at work or at play, was the sin Joseph K. was summoned to answer for to an immanent power, not knowing what the charge was, knowing only that if that power said he was guilty of something, then he was decreed so.
    This philosophizing reconciled Sonny, a profoundly defeatist way of staunching the kind of slow flux which is yearning. He was able to find satisfaction in the detachment of seeing the municipality and the Greek tearoom where his family could not sit down, in these terms. He became fascinated, as an intellectual exercise, with the idea of power as an abstraction, an extra-religious mystery, since religions explained away all mystery in the person of mythical beings, one religion even awkwardly offering a half-god, half-man, born of a virgin woman, so as to make that particular myth somehow more credible. And although Kafka explained the context of the schoolteacher’s life better than Shakespeare, Sonny did not go so far as to believe, with Kafka, that the power in which people are held powerless exists only in their own submission.

    He knew better. There were the local law-makers, proconsuls, gauleiters in the town’s council chamber under the photographs of past mayors and the motto CARPE DIEM.
    Â 
    Â 
    I think they were happy when my sister and I were little, in that township we lived in outside the Reef town. So far as children can know what their parents are; considerate, discreet parents like ours, not the drunken violent ones, some of our neighbours whose ugly lives came reverberating through our walls, and whose kids ran to our house out of fear of what was being revealed to them. Sometimes a woman would ask my father to ‘speak to’ her husband. I hung around my father, climbing on the back of his old armchair or leaning against his legs when strangers were there and understanding snatches of what was being said: the man had beaten her, he was drunk every night, he was going to lose his job with a builder. I stared in curiosity at the fear-distorted, snivelling face I never saw in my own home.
    It wasn’t only self-respect my father had; people respected him, not even a drunk would curse him. I don’t know what made all sorts of men and women feel he would find for them their way out of the bewilderment of debt, ignorance, promiscuity and insecurity that giddied them, so that they lunged from one sordid obstacle to the next. It