Free My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer

We were so clever; he made us such a good team, a comic team. What a buffoon he made of me, his son, backward, stumbling along behind, aping his lies. Poor Tom to his Lear (I should have told him that, sometime, it’s the sort of sign he’d appreciate that my education hasn’t been wasted). I don’t think he ever told direct lies, at least when I was around. When he went off to his woman he never said he was going to be somewhere else; he didn’t have to, my mother respected the fact that a man doing underground political work (his full-time clandestine occupation once he came out of prison) cannot reveal his movements without involving and endangering his family.

    The walls in what was meant to be a white man’s house aren’t like those in the house outside Benoni through which we couldn’t help hearing the neighbours’ quarrels and sexual groans. I don’t know what went on—how he managed, without me, when they were alone in their bedroom. Their bedroom with the bed-head that extended at right angles like elbows, on either side of the bed, into two small cabinets, each with a lamp for which she had made a shade, on her side the alarm clock and lemon hand-cream pot, on his an overspill of newspapers, torch, aspirins in an ashtray Baby made him when she was small, book he was currently reading. I can only imagine. Invent from what I knew of her, what I knew of what he’d become. What did he think of to say to her while he was untying the shoelaces he’d tied when he got out of bed with that woman. Perhaps when you’ve been married a long time it’s a shared burrow you scuttle along, every feature of it, for one, known by the other, every comment on the way anticipated by the other. The bedrooms, the nights, are like that. But he came and went by secret passages; he had things to say that he never could say. He must have had to watch every word.
    And not only words. Once when I got into the back seat of the car I saw something strange on the floor. Everything; anything, alerted me to danger. My mother was getting into the front seat beside him; I waited until we’d driven off and they were deciding whether or not it was necessary to go to the bank before filling up with petrol, and I was able to pick up the object without them noticing. It was the dried head of a sunflower. Just the hard disc from which the seeds had fallen. Exactly like a round honeycomb. I don’t know how it could have got there. Why. I only knew he would not be able to explain it to my mother; he did not need to explain anything to me, since the cinema, when he’d told me what to see and made clear what I was not to have seen.

    My mother seemed to me as she always had been. Only, because of what I was in with, with him, and so afraid of—for her—there seemed to be some kind of space around her that kept us off—him and me—and that I held my breath for fear of entering. I didn’t want to be in the room alone with her, either. But if I kept out of her way she would know there was something wrong, thinking in her innocence this would be something concerning me. And if I tried to be with her, to cover up that he wasn’t—that might set her thinking, and I didn’t want her to think, I didn’t want my mother to think about him in any other but her gentle, trusting way, changed from the old times on the Reef simply by the special respect and privacy she taught us, by her example, he had earned by the pilgrimage through prison.
    It’s only since Baby cut her wrists that I’ve known my mother knew about him all the time. Well, not at the beginning (and even I don’t know when exactly that was, whether the cinema was early on), but for a long time. She surely couldn’t have known when, some weeks after my father was released, she and the wives of two other men who had been in prison with him decided to give a little New Year party for them