Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

Old stock; hers. She goes over it again, toes, thighs, twat (yes, put down the great notion it had of itself, temple of pleasure), nice breasts. The face can be left out of it, thank God, you can’t verify your own face by looking down on it in the bath, wiggling it, spouting its flesh out of the water and scuttling it to sink to the belly button again. This is not a bath with mirrors, far nicer, it has a glass wall that looks on a tiny courtyard no bigger than an airshaft where shade-loving plants and ferns grow, ingeniously and economically watered, in time of drought, by the outlet from the bath. They flourish in water favoured by this flesh as the Shi-ites buy grace in the form of bathwater used by the Aga Khan. She ought to contemplate the plants instead. She feels she doesn’t want to, she doesn’t want to be distracted from what she has to see, but she forces herself — she must stop watching herself, and this makes her feel someone’s watching her, there’s a gaze forming outside her awareness of self, it exists for a moment between the greenery.

Looking at the woman in the bath. Seeing what she sees.

She thought of it as having struck her, first, as the head of antiquity, the Egyptian basalt rigidity, twice removed — as animal and attribute of a god — from man, but with a gleam of close golden brown eyes like a human’s.

No. A real baboon, Peeping Tom at large in the suburbs.

She had to think of it as that. If not (soaking herself groggy, seeing things), it would have to be her own visitation; a man.

Eddie came upon some droppings not far from the back of the shed. They looked human, to him. All four went to the spot to have a look. The Kleynhans place was so isolated, except for the passage of life on the road, to which it offered no reason to pause. They had felt themselves safe from intruders.

The hard twist of excreta was plaited with fur and sinew: Charles picked it up in his bare hand. ‘See that? It had rabbit for supper. A jackal.’

Joy gave a shivery laugh, although there was no prowling man to fear. ‘So close to the house?’

Vusi was disbelieving. ‘Nothing to eat there.’ The converted shed with its roll-down metal door was just behind them.

‘Well, they pad around, sniff around. I suppose this place’s still got a whiff of chickens and pigs. It’s quite common even now, you get the odd jackal roaming fairly near to towns.’

‘Are you sure? How can you know it’s jackal, Charlie?’

Charles waggled the dung under Eddie’s nose.

‘Hey, man!’ Eddie backed off, laughing nervously.

Vusi was a tester of statements rather than curious. ‘Can you tell all kinds of animals’ business?’

‘Of course. First there’s the shape and size, that’s easy, ay, anyone can tell an elephant’s from a bird’s—’ They laughed, but Charles was matter-of-fact, as someone who no longer works in a factory will pick up a tool and use it with the same automative skill learnt on an assembly line. ‘But even if the stuff is broken up, you can say accurately which animal by examining food content. The bushmen — the San, Khoikhoi — they’ve practised it for centuries, part of their hunting skills.’

‘Is that what they taught you at Scouts, man?’

‘No. Not Scouts exactly.’

‘So where’d you pick it up?’ Eddie rallied the others. ‘A Number Two expert! He’s clever, old Charlie. We’re lucky to have a chap like him, ay!’

Joy was listening politely, half-smiling, to Charles retelling, laconically self-censored, what had been the confidences of their early intimacy.

‘Once upon a time I was a game ranger, believe it or not.’ That was one of the things he had tried in order to avoid others: not to have to go into metal and corrugated paper packaging in which his father and uncles held 40 per cent of the shares, not to take up (well, all right, if you’re not cut out for business) an opening in a quasi-governmental fuel research unit — without, for a long time, knowing that there was no way out for him, neither the detachment of science nor the consolations of nature. Born what he was, where he was, knowing what he knew, outrage would have burned down to shame if he had thought his generation had any right left to something in the careers guide.

‘You’re kidding. Where?’

‘Oh, around. An ignoramus with a B.Sc. Honours, but the Shangaan rangers educated me.’

‘Oh, Kruger Park, you mean. They work there. That place.’ Vusi’s jerk of the head cut off his words like an appalled flick of fingers. Once, he had come in through that vast wilderness of protected species; an endangered one on his way to become operational. Fear came back to him as a layer of cold liquid under the scalp. All that showed was that his small stiff ears pulled slightly against his skull.

Charles wiped his palm on his pants and clasped hands behind his head, easing his neck, his matronly pectorals flexing to keep in trim while waiting. ‘One day I’d like to apply the methodology to humans — a class anal ysis.’ (He enjoyed their laughter.) ‘The sewage from a white suburb and the sewage from a squatters’ camp — you couldn’t find a better way of measuring the level of sustenance afforded by different income levels, even the snobbery imposed by different occupations and aspirations. A black street-sweeper who scoffed half a loaf and a Bantu beer for lunch, a white executive who’s digested oysters and a bottle of Fleur du Cap, — show me what you shit, man, and I’ll tell you who you are.’

That afternoon a black man did appear in the yard. He was not a prowler, although he probably had been watching them, the Kleynhans place, since they’d moved in. He would have known from where this could be managed delicately, without disturbing them or being seen.

He was a middle-aged farm labourer dressed in his church clothes so that the master and the missus wouldn’t chase him away as a skelm . But he needn’t have worried, because the master and the missus never appeared from the house. He found the two men who worked there at Baas Kleynhans’s place now, as he had done, farm boys. He had come to see how his mealies were getting along. Yes. Yes. . There was a long pause, in which the corollary to that remark would have time to be understood: he had been circling round the Kleynhans place, round this moment, to come to the point — an agreement whereby he could claim his mealie crop when it was ready for harvest. These other two, his brothers (he spoke to them in Sesotho and they answered in that language, but when he asked where they were from they said Natal) were welcome to eat what they liked, he was only worried about the white farmer. Could they claim the patch as the usual bit of ground for pumpkins and mealies farmers allowed their blacks? He would come and weed the mealies himself very early in the morning, before the baas got up, he wouldn’t bring his brothers any trouble.

But the young men were good young men. They wouldn’t hear of baba doing that. The one in jeans and a shirt with pictures all over it (farm boys dressed just the same as youngsters from town, these days) said he was looking after the mealies, don’t worry. Gazing round his old home yard, the man admired the new garage with the nice door that had been made out of the shed and asked why this new white man hadn’t ploughed? What were they going to plant? And what was his (Vusi’s) work, if this white man wasn’t going to have any pigs or chickens? They explained that farming hadn’t really begun yet. First they’d built the garage, and Vusi — Vusi had been working inside. Helping the farmer fix things up. Painting the house. Ah yes, Baas Kleynhans was sick a long time before he died, there was no one to look after the house nicely.