Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

Now when he did speak, on the conscious level of their being in the room together, it seemed to her he did not know who he was; she had to make the quick adjustment to his working perception of himself. ‘You not really married?’

She looked at his mystery, while he showed simple curiosity.

‘No. Not really anything.’

He understood — was meant to understand? — she doesn’t sleep with Charlie. If so, it was a confidence that licensed questions. ‘What’s the idea?’

‘Well. There’s no other room for me, is there.’

He arched his head back against the chair, expelled a breath towards the ceiling with its pine-knots and pressed lead curlicues all four of them, at times, took tally of obsessively.

‘We came to a sort of stop. About five months ago, after nearly six years. But we’d already accepted to do this, while we were still together, so we couldn’t let that make any difference.’

‘Hell, you’re a funny kind of woman.’

It was said with detached admiration. She laughed. ‘You know better than I do what matters.’

‘Sure. Still—’

‘It’s because I’m a woman you say still —’

He saw she jealously took his admiration as some sort of discrimination within commitment. He shied away. There came out of that mouth of his a careless response a city black man picks up as the idiom of whites in the streets. ‘That’s one I can’t handle.’

He escaped her, taking up Africa Undermined aimlessly and putting it down again on his way out of the room.

Charles returned from his daily run; part of the routine he had constructed for himself to support the waiting. His rump in satiny blue-and-red shorts rose and fell before motorists who overtook him and often waved in approval of his healthy employment of time. Eddie would have liked to come along (oh how long — five years — ago, as a seventeen-year-old in Soweto he had run in training, had ambitions as an amateur flyweight) but a black-and-white couple would have been conspicuous. Panting like a happy dog, shaggy with warm odours, Charles was brought up short, in the room, as when one enters where some event is just over; but all that he was sensing, without identifying this, was that he had been talked about in his absence.

Although once she would have made a peg with fingers on her nose and so sent him off to shower, she did not now have the rights over his body to tell him he stank of good sweat; just smiled quickly and went on with her future tenses. He meant to go and get dressed but the need to know everything his colleagues knew, to follow their minds wherever they went, that would have made him a natural chairman of the board if he had grown up responding differently to propitious ‘circumstances’, led him to have a look at what chapter Vusi had reached in his book, and then, although he himself had read the book, to begin reading, again, wherever the other man had made his mark in ballpoint blue.

Not suddenly — there must have been the too-soft impression before first Charles, then Joy became conscious of it — there was a voice never heard before, in the house where no one but the four of them ever entered, now. It was unexpected as the feeble cry of something newborn.

Vusi came into the room with an instrument from which he was producing a voice. He passed Charles and stood before Joy, playing a muffled, sweet, half-mumbled ‘Georgia On My Mind’ — yes, that was it, identified as a bird-call can be made out as phonetic syllables humans translate into words. From those lips rippling and contracting round a mouthpiece, beneath his fingers pressing crude buttons, the song was issuing from an instrument strangely recognisable, absurd and delightful. Every now and then he drew a gulp of breath, like a swimmer. He played on, the voice gaining power, sometimes stammering (the peculiar buttons got stuck), occasionally squealing, but achieving the gentle, wah-wah sonority, rocket rise to high note and steady gliding fall out of hearing that belong to one instrument alone.

While what they had to do was wait, Vusi made a saxophone.

It was for this that he had collected the tabbed rings off beer cans. The curved neck was perhaps the easiest. It was made of articulated sections hammered from jam tins. Some of the more intricate parts must have required a thicker material. There might be a few cartridge cases transformed in the keyboard. He had worked on the saxophone shut up in the shed with the necessities stored there, as well as away down at the pigsties, where it was tried out without anyone else being able to hear it.

The white couple marvelled over the thing. An extraordinary artefact, as well as a musical instrument. Having played it to the girl that first time it was ever played for others, Vusi was unmoved by praise because no one would see what they were really looking at, as laymen enthuse over something that can’t be grasped through their secular appreciation.

He didn’t know Charles was reminded of the ingenuity of objects displayed in the concentration camps of Europe, now museums. These were made by the inmates out of nothing, effigies of the beautiful possibilities of a life to be lived.

The municipal art gallery owns a sacred monkey. A charming image, an Indian statuette copied by a Viennese artist in glazed ceramic, green as if carved out of deep water. It lives in a cupboard behind glass. The gallery is poorly endowed with the art of the African continent on which it stands, and has no example of the dog-faced ape of ancient Egyptian mythology, Cynocephalus, often depicted attendant upon the god Thoth, which she has seen in museums abroad and has been amused to recognise as the two-thousand-year-old spitting image of a baboon species still numerous in South Africa.

A set of pan pipes sticking up out of the bathwater: toes. A face reflected in the snout of the shiny tap bulged into a merry gourd with a Halloween mouth. She can look at that but she doesn’t want to see the distortion of her lower torso which is reflected if she leans her head, in its plastic mob cap, against the back of the bath. Her legs become gangling and bowed, joined by huge feet at one end and a curved perspective that leads back to a hairy creature, crouched. There is nothing beyond this voracious pudenda; it has swallowed the body and head behind it. She lies in the bath for relaxation. Nobody’s told her she’s dying, but they’re being brought down all around her, as a lion moves into a herd, tearing into the flesh of his victims. A breast off here; a piece of lung there; a bladder cut down to size. She lies on her back and palpates her breasts dutifully. There are ribs, but no lumps. The nipples don’t rise; that’s good, she doesn’t like the masturbatory aspect of what doctors advise you to do to yourself, as a precaution, in order to stay alive. These breasts don’t recognise her hands; they’ve known only male ones. Her hands don’t make them remember those.

Despite the fun-palace image in the tap, her real thighs still have that firm classical roundness. They don’t pile like half-set junket round the knees when she’s standing. Not yet.

The delicately engraved imprint of autumn leaves — a few vari-cosed patches — is more or less covered by a tan.

However she lies, her stomach rises like the Leviathan.

It was always there, waiting, flattened between the hip bones, for its years to come! She doesn’t take it too hard. These fantasies are the consequence of waking so early, and there’s a simple scientific explanation for that: reduced hormonal activity means you need less sleep. She nods her head in sage comprehension when this is explained to her; what it really means is you sleep eight hours after love-making. She feels them, other people, sleeping this sleep in other rooms. It’s true that as you get older you suddenly know what happened in childhood. She understands quite differently, now, the family joke she used to be told about how she crawled over to her mother’s bed at dawn, lifted her sleeping eyelid and spat in her eye. Oh lovers, I envy you the sleep, not the love-making, but nobody would believe me. I am told to disbelieve myself. ‘It’s something a doctor can’t really let himself prescribe. . but you need to stop thinking you’re not interesting to men any longer.’