My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer Page A

in her shiny plait down the back of her dressing-gown. They sleep in the same bed, but does he love her, after he’s come from the other one? I never used to think about them—him, my mother—that way. I don’t want to think about it now. I don’t want to think he pretends she’s pink and thick and soft; as I pretend, in dreams, that I’m doing things to them, the blondes in full-page spreads I tear out.

Sonny was not prepared for a visit granted to someone monitoring for a human rights organization. Friends and even relatives who had applied to see him had been denied permission; political comrades dared not show themselves for fear they’d be locked up, as well. For three months he saw no-one from outside. Then he saw only Aila, and once or twice the children were allowed to accompany her. That was as he had expected. He knew he was on his way to prison from the days back in the coloured location of his home-town on the Reef when he had led his pupils across the veld to the black location—as he still called those places, then. Or if he didn’t know it, he should have; he realized this as, instinctively taking up one form of political action after another, he understood that the mystery of the meaning of life he and Aila had vaguely known to be contained in living useful lives was no mystery. For them, their kind, black like the others, there was only one meaning: the political struggle. (As he loved the magnificent choices of Shakespearean
language, the crudely reductive terms of political concepts were an embarrassment to him, but he had to use them, like everybody else.)
    Family matters. It was the rule in prison that only family matters could be discussed during visits. Well, these were what always had been discussed between Aila and him. He asked if Will was managing to keep up, in maths. If Baby was being helpful or spending too much time at parties. Aila reassured him; everything was all right. The very look of her conveyed that to him; at home, indeed, everything was the same; her black hair smoothly coiled, a necklace chosen to pick out a colour in the elegant tweed jacket she had sewn for herself. Her beautiful lips carefully drawn. The same; that sameness seemed to recede from him the more they talked about it, about family matters. And he had expected to yearn for home. The silences between Aila and him that were so comfortable, natural in their closeness, at home, were now a real silence without communication of any kind. He had been taught, in the tactics of the struggle, that it was possible to use a private, oblique language to receive information from intimates, but Aila didn’t seem to catch on. She was calm but he noticed she held her arms close to her sides as if to draw away from the presence of the warders who flanked him. What private language? They had had love-names, tender and jokey euphemisms for what was hard to express, key words that recalled events in their life together or the antics of one or other of their children—who could expect Aila to put love-talk to the use of a prison code?
    The stranger from the human rights organization had no family matters, with him, to confine herself to. He didn’t know how she managed to get permission for such visits, but it was clear she had somehow obtained it and already seen several of his comrades. She conveyed this ingeniously in an abstract
vocabulary that the two warders, blinking dully and even yawning, could not follow and clearly soon ceased to listen to. He didn’t know what she had been told she would be allowed to talk about; presumably only to ask him if he was receiving adequate food, exercise periods and medical care. Talking about food she was actually letting him know that in another prison some of the comrades were on a hunger strike, and apparently innocently relating the weather report she was able to indicate—remarking which cities were receiving heavy rainfall—where