None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer Page A

comes to African fleshiness from the mixture with European blood, and prematurely aged (she could probably give Mrs Stark a year or two) by the determination to defeat poverty by the virtues of fastidious cleanliness and decency believed to belong without effort to people with money, the rewards of being white. The door is not that of a house but the side-door of a garage; a stove, refrigerator, TV, beds, the family is living there. —Colin’s doing the house on weekends, oh it’s over a year now, a slow business!— The older woman insists on making tea, there’s a granadilla cake with yellow icing, she breaks in for emphasis: —His brother-in-law, my other daughter’s husband, he’s in the trade, and there’s others in the family comes to plaster and so on.—
    â€”Sundays it’s quite a party!— Distracted from her tears by the comfort of pride, the young one shows Mrs Stark over what will be her house one day, Sunday by Sunday, the breakfast nook, Colin’s clever with his hands he’s doing the table himself,the master bedroom (she calls it), the kids here, with an entrance to the yard for them, the living-dining’s going to have a hatch counter to the kitchen, ma’s room with a separate bathroom and that, this’s the foundation for a patio and braai. The visitor is led outside again to admire the façade. There is no roof yet but on the unplastered wall where the window frames are paneless the replica of a brass carriage lamp is in place just as if it were standing to light the pillared entrance to a white man’s driveway.
    The assertion of this half-built house is so undeniable that both women feel an unreality in returning to the object of Mrs Stark’s presence, which was supposed to be an inquiry into what happened in Phambili Park the night a man was murdered on the young woman’s doorstep. This sort of investigation was not normally within the purview of the Foundation, but on this occasion, as increasingly lately, the connection between the people who had been removed from a site and squatted near Phambili Park because they had nowhere else to go, and the violence from hostel dwellers they were subject to, pursuing them, the disruption this in turn caused residents in a legally proclaimed, upgraded etc. township, was relevant to the Foundation’s case against the removal. The young woman leads Mrs Stark up and down roads in the veld drawn by the rough fingernail of an earth-mover. Woodpecker tapping—building going on wherever you look—the veld an endless offering to the infinity of light that is a clear Transvaal sky, scaffolding standing out in the exaggerated perspective of bareness, de Chirico, Dali, thought they imagined it, Munch saw open-mouthed women fleeing in space from dingy, smoke-smouldering encrustation of shanties, there, over there. But where is Europe, what place has the divorce of a banker in the mind of anyone picking a way over rubble and weeds to the neat hallucination of small houses with their fancy burglar grilles, and flowered bedsheets hung out to dry, someonespeaking to families living in garages while the habitation that has existed over years, in their minds, is slowly materialized in walls rising at the rate at which money is saved and free Sundays are available. The normality in these homes—camping out in the garage is home, because it is the first occupation of what has existed in mind—is also hallucinatory. So what is normality? Isn’t it just the way people manage to live under any particular circumstance; the children who are teetering a stolen supermarket trolley under the weight of two drums of water back to the squatter camp (one of the Phambili Park residents’ complaints is that the squatters come over to use their taps)—the children are performing a normal task in terms of where and how they live. They yell and pummel one another, tumbling about as they go. A