None to Accompany Me by Nadine Gordimer Page B

carriage lamp is the blazon of aspiration, fixed to the wall where a mob smashes a man’s head in.
    Mrs Stark put her notes into the sling bag, assuring that she would find her way back to the city. Without the face of a resident in black areas as escort beside her, she took the precaution of locking the car doors and closing the windows. Moving in a capsule; neither what usefulness her notes will be to the case nor the letter lying beneath the notebook dispelled the unreality of the place just left behind. She was accustomed to squatter camps, slum townships, levels of existence of which white people were not aware; the sudden illusion of suburbia, dropped here and there, standing up stranded on the veld between the vast undergrowth of tin and sacking and plastic and cardboard that was the natural terrain, was something still to be placed.
    She had an urge to pull over to the roadside and read the letter.
    But it was a resort to distraction; just as having to go about her business to somewhere named Phambili Park had served asa reason to thrust the letter half-read into her catch-all bag. And you don’t stop for any reason or anyone on roads these days. With one hand on the wheel, she delved into the bag to feel for the envelope.
Ivan a frowning child her own frown of attention always looking back at her from him his habit of fingering his nose while he talked (don’t do it, it’s ugly) at the butcher’s I never knew our brains was like that a carriage lamp to shine out over the grey spill—
    She found she was at the turn-off to the hospital where the soft-voiced witness had said people from the squatter camp had taken refuge. So she drove into the hospital grounds, waved on by security guards, and brought the car to a standstill. But not to read a letter.
    She trudged over raked gravel between beds of regimented marigolds towards the wings of the hospital, dodging the hiss of the sprinkler system. Pigeons waddled to drink from the spray; a two-metre-high security fence under the hooded eyes of stadium lights surrounded this provincial administration’s hallucination of undisturbed ordinance. All along the standard red-brick and green-painted walls of the hospital people were collected as if blown there as plastic bags and paper were blown against the fence. Women sat on the ground with their legs folded under skirts and aprons, small children clinging and climbing about them. Men hunched with heads down on their knees, in a dangling hand a cigarette stub, or stood against the walls; looked up from staring at feet in broken track shoes advertised for the pleasures of sport. She greeted some groups; they blinked listlessly past her. She made a pretext for her approach, Were there people living in the hospital? An old woman took a pinch of snuff and pointed while she drew it up her nostrils. Are you sleeping there? A woman tugged at the blanket tied cutting into the shapeof her sturdy breasts, needing to accuse anyone who would listen. —They tell us no more place. Here! We sleeping here!—
    Out of the stasis others were attracted. They didn’t seem to understand questions in English or Afrikaans—Mrs Stark knew from experience how people in shock and bewilderment lose their responses in confusion, anyway—but the woman in the blanket spoke for them. —Five days I been here. What can I do? That night those shit take eveything, they kill—look at this old man, no blanket, nothing, the hospital give him blanket, when he’s run those men catch his brother, TV, bicycle, everything is gone from his place—shit!—
    The man was coughing, his knees pressed together and shoulders narrowed over his chest, folding himself out of the danger of existence; the babies sucked at breasts, greedily taking it on.
    â€”And this woman, she try to go to her home yesterday, in the night she come back again. No good, terrible—
    The woman had the serene broad face that at the