Free None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer Page B

in rock pools, sensitive to the temptation of the slightest touch. Not only had she thought she never could be attracted to another man; she had been sure she would never be attracted to another blond man. So it was this foreigner who exorcised for her some residual resentment—and resentment remains always damaging—that must be surviving against the first blond, the wartime husband. She wanted to tell Otto this odd fact, a confession surely endearing if not flattering to him, but didn’t because she sensed that references to that war, at the end of which he wasa child, made him uneasy—for herself, she had no embarrassment at being so much older than he; verifying critically in a mirror, she knew there was no mark of ageing to be found on
her!
    But she had said after the first few times she had visited One-Twenty-One, This won’t last long, you know.
    He misunderstood what she was telling him: that he couldn’t count against Ben, although she was free to choose both of them. He thought she was referring to the limit of his working assignment in the country. —I’ve got a surprise for you—I’ve applied to be stationed here, the channel’s correspondent for the region.—
    They were getting dressed. He did not know what to make of the way she dropped her hands at her sides. He came over and bound her arms with his, bending his head to bury it in her neck.
    Alongside the success of managing clandestinity there was in her a wish to take her foreigner home, to introduce him to her life, so that he might know her elsewhere than behind a desk or in his bed. She rationalized: if he were invited to the house occasionally, as both she and Ben would naturally bring home a new acquaintance whom they liked, this would reduce the risk of someone drawing other conclusions should she and Otto happen to be seen together somewhere.
    Otto was reluctant to come to Vera’s home, to enter her life in which he had no part. But he acknowledged she must be a better judge than he in the situation. There were other guests, some of them blacks he had met in the course of his filming of trade union officials and minor political figures, and there was the husband, an impressive man, very skilful in pleasing the guests in unison with his wife, the two of them managing the gathering. The wife: that’s what she was, in this house. He wasintroduced, also, to her daughter, who quickly disappeared from the parents’ gathering that no doubt bored her; beautiful, but exactly like the father. So there was nothing to trouble him as evidence, in a younger version of herself, that his lover had faded in the years she had lived ahead of him.
    With the chat that accompanies clearing away in the wake of guests Ben mentioned he hadn’t had much chance to talk to the young German, what was his name again? A strange name; giving it, she asked in innocent-sounding interest what its origin might be? Ben was so well-read, had a memory for all kinds of esoteric knowledge that never came her way.
    â€”Abarbanel? But that’s an old Sephardic name, must be a Jew, not a German.—
    â€”I think he’s Austrian.— She was enquiring.
    â€”Could have been born there, I suppose. Jews’ve been dispersed all over, so long. Who knows.—
    Who knows.
    And so it was her husband who roused her curiosity. An erotic curiosity. In the dreamy confidentiality after love-making, she spoke to her lover. —So you’re a Jew. Someone told me your name’s Jewish. Sephardic. That’s Spanish, isn’t it.—
    â€” It has a Spanish origin but the Jews were expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century.—
    â€”I wouldn’t have known you were a Jew.— Murmured laugh. —They’re supposed to be circumcised.—
    â€”I didn’t have the usual sort of beginning and I was sent away quite young with other orphans and adopted, I grew up in Vienna with those people who took