None to Accompany Me Read Online Free PDF Page A

there. He spoke in Afrikaans, since she thought she would make herself acceptable by trying to speak his language.
    â€”Daar’s
geen Odensville se mense nie!
Odensville is my township that’s not yet declared, nobody is living in Odensville, nobody! All those people are trespassers and the only thing I’m going to tell you, lady (the term of address emphasized, and in English), I’m going to get them run off my land, I’m going to burn down their rubbish, and you can go back yourself and tellthem I’m not just talking, I’m not talking at all to you, I’ve got the men to do it with me, we know how to get it done, all right, and if they want to get in the way, that’s going to be their funeral. Running to you won’t help them. There are no Odensville ‘people’, so you can forget about calling them that. They’re nothing,
vuilgoed.—
    This meddling woman—lawyers, they call themselves!— stood calmly, even the twitch of something like a smile at the side of her mouth, as if waiting for a tantrum to spend itself. He began to breathe heavily at the insult.
    The black man he would never speak to—never!—looked at him unavoidably as the dark aperture of a camera aimed. This was a country black, brought up where his parents and grandparents, share-croppers and labourers, spoke the language of the farmer they worked for, and the school for blacks where he learnt to read and write taught in Afrikaans, not his black language. The man’s Afrikaans was Odendaal’s, not Mrs Stark’s pidgin.
    â€”Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid. We won’t harm you. Not you or your wife and children.—
    The woman lawyer touched the man’s shirt-sleeve (dressed up like a gentleman, jacket over his arm). Before she led the way back to the station-wagon she paused persistently. —Mr Odendaal, I apologize for turning up without telephoning. I’ll be writing to you and probably will be able to explain the Foundation’s assessment of the situation more acceptably than I’ve been able to do now.—
    The farmer turned his back. He opened his front door and slammed it on them behind him. In the optical illusion of blotchy explosions that comes with leaving the glare of sun for a dim hallway, he, too, paused a moment. He listened to hear thestation-wagon leave his property. As if he had just stopped running, his leaping, bursting heart slowly decelerated to its normal pace.
    For a long time—how many years?—Vera still told her husband everything. Or thought she did.
    Meneer Odendaal, don’t be afraid. We won’t harm you.
    This reaction, response, whatever you like to call it, lay between her husband and her like a gift. Of what, to whom, their faces showed neither could decide. Back in the blueish domes where his black eyes always stirred in her the strange attention they had attracted against the thudding of a waterfall she and he had climbed to at the beginning, she looked for his answer. Once he had been the answer to everything; that was falling in love: the end of questions. But she was finding an answer within herself. The gift of the squatter leader’s tolerance, forgiveness—whichever it was—was something the farmer didn’t deserve.
    And it was unclaimed! Rejected. —Don’t you see, he isn’t able to be aware of it.— A further explanation, coming from one whose familiar symmetry of features juxtaposed the harmony of life with the discord she had not only witnessed, but been part of in this experience and was part of routinely in many others. How could these contradictions exist in one species, the human one? How could such beauty be achieved in the composition of this man’s, her chosen one’s, face, and such ugliness distort the ability of human response in that man’s, the farmer’s, spirit?
    â€”Who’s the fellow, anyway—from Odensville—d’you