My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer Page B

many other comrades were held. When she began saying how very stuffy it was, by contrast, in Pretoria, she quickly noticed he was bewildered, straining to follow, and gazing at him in a pause, a silence of greatest aliveness reaching out to him, drew him to realize she was telling him she had been to the Supreme Court where others who were detained when he was were now charged.—And in crowded places it’s going to get hotter.—She had narrow blue eyes, the kind that do not have much depth or variety of expression, like the glass-bright eyes fixed so realistically in furry stuffed toys yet which hold attention by their surface colour. He eagerly understood she was passing a message that he might expect to be charged soon.
    A stranger has no love-talk, but she was the one who unknowingly found the way to connect him with home, with the possibility of home. It was a casual remark following on a question about how he was passing the time, which he could not answer because a warder woke and intervened, saying talk of prison matters was not allowed.
    â€”Well, I suppose you find sermons in stones.—A bit breathless at having managed at least to hand on some of the information she had been given by others, she jerked her head shyly at the confines of the walls.
    He grinned to receive this, another kind of message, she
was almost certainly not aware of; elated to be able to recognize it.—And good in your kindness in coming to see me.—
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    The young woman was not graceful or well dressed—not in the way he liked, in a woman, that gave a woman like his wife class and breeding, even in the ghetto. But what does that matter. Sonny had had to change his mind about so many things, as his life changed, as the very meaning of his ridiculous name changed—first a hangover from sentimental parents, then a nickname to reassure the crowds at rallies that he was one of them, then an addendum to his full names in a prison dossier: ‘also known as “Sonny” ’. A common criminal with aliases.
    Hannah. She introduced herself like that at once; a prison visiting room is no place for formalities. It was only later, when he met her outside prison, that he saw how she had been the first time she came to visit. Head and shoulders, the portrait was, that he kept with him everywhere, in his mind, as a photograph is carried between identity documents in a breast pocket. It must have been a cold June day outside—but prison always gave the impression of cold, anyway, swept clean, bare, with only hairy floating filaments in a cone of light, alive; from the breasts up, as she appeared behind glass above the wooden barrier, she had prepared herself with layers of garments, loose-sleeved knitted things over some sort of canvas waistcoat and several T-shirts whose clashing colours overlapped at the neckline. She had eased a striped scarf and freed her broad, matt-white neck in a gush of warmth (a retouch of the picture that came from subsequent experience of her presence without the separation of glass and wood). Her lips were quilted by the dry cold and paler than a soft pink face whose colour changed with a kind of patchy radiance as she steered double-talk past the
warders. A big face whose bone structure was not evident. Two small cold-reddened pads of earlobes appearing and disappearing under rough-cut curly hair. Blonde. Of course, with that skin colouring. Very blonde. But not consciously so (as so many women with that attribute tend to be); her attention on more important things. He could not reconstruct how she had looked full-length, walking away from him after a warder. The lightly freckled calves that remained sturdy right down to the ankle, bringing her towards him, were not any fixed image, but recurring through the pattern of their meetings, moving; always now , not then .
    She came to the trial. It was her professional duty. She was often there; when he and the others with whom he