Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

The three black men talked together in the yard for more than an hour. They drifted towards a couple of boxes that still stood there, from Charles’s deliveries, and sat on them, facing one another, gesticulating and smoking, sometimes breaking the little knot with a high exclamation or a piece of mimicry, laughter. When the man took off his felt hat a lump at the centre of his dusty hairline was polished by the sun. The white couple got a look at them from the bathroom window. It was an opaque glass hatch that opened under layers of dead creeper. What was happening in the yard could have been seen and heard more clearly from the kitchen windows, but the white couple also would have been visible, there, and they could not understand what was being said, anyway.

At first they felt only anxiety. Then they began to feel like eavesdroppers, spies: those who have no commune, those on the outside. The slow accretion of past weeks that was the four of them — a containing: a shell, a habitation — was broken. Eddie and Vusi were out there, yet it was Charles and Joy who were alone. They had no way of knowing what it was they were witnessing.

The man wobbled away on an old bicycle, calling the dying fall of farewells that go back and forth between country blacks. Both the pair in the house and the pair outside waited, just as they were, for about ten minutes. Vusi was silent but Charles and Joy (still in the bathroom, with its snivelling tap) could hear the continuing murmur of Eddie in monologue.

They all met in the kitchen. The girl looked ridiculously breathless, to the two coming in from the yard, as if she had been climbing.

‘He used to work for the man who owned this place before. He wants his mealies.’

Charles’s emotions, like his blood, flushed near the surface. He was testy when anxious; now, impatient with Vusi. ‘It took the whole afternoon to say that! Christ, we’ve been going crazy. You seemed to know the man. We thought — God knows what — that you were having to give explanations, that you were cornered — I don’t know? And what could we do? You seemed to be enjoying yourselves, for Christ’ sake. .’

As anxiety found release his tone drained of accusation; he ended up excited, half-laughing, rolling tendrils of bright beard between thumb and finger. Like a fragment of food, at table, a shred of leaf from the dead creeper round the bathroom window clung to the hairs.

Eddie went to the fridge and took out beer. ‘We should have given him something to drink, but I couldn’t come into the white baas’s kitchen and just take. He must’ve wondered why we didn’t have any in his old room, man; I was scared he’d ask to go in there, and see no beds, nothing. I was already thinking could I say we had girlfriends somewhere, where we sleep. But he knows everybody for miles around this place.’

They discussed the man and decided there was nothing they could do except hope he would not come back too shortly. Soon it would not matter any more if he did.

Joy did not look at Charles but directed a remark at him: ‘If we have to stay much longer I’ll have to start wearing a pillow. When I met our friend the estate agent’s wife at the chemist’s last week she had a good look at me. “You don’t show yet, do you, dear?” ’

‘Oh my God. You’d better stop going to town.’

She did not complain. Her hair was put up in an odd knot on the side of her head — she was a woman, after all, she played about with her appearance, waiting. The way of doing her hair was very unattractive; on the side from which it was pulled over, the bone behind her ear was prominent and her skull looked flattened. ‘And what was that Cyclops eye on his forehead?’

Eddie winced, puzzled. ‘That what?’

‘Some lump I could see in the sun, quite big and shiny.’

Charles tossed the remark absently at her, no one was interested. ‘A cyst, I suppose. I didn’t notice.’

‘Like a bulging eye in the middle of his head. Or one of Moses’s horns growing.’

Vusi had no need of ring-tabs any longer — he dropped his in his emptied beer can and gave it a shake, sounding a rattle for attention. ‘Kleynhans paid him fifteen rands a month. He worked for him for twelve years. When Kleynhans died, the daughter told the agent Klopper he could stay on without pay in that room in the yard until the place was sold. His son works at the brick-field and lives with his wife and kids with those other squatters near there. They’ve been chased off twice but they built their shack again. Since we came, the old man’s living with them. No job. No permission to look for work in town. Nowhere to go.’

‘Yes.’ Charles dragged all five fingers again and again through his beard. ‘Yes.’

A habitation of resolve, secreted by their presence among one another, contained them again, the four of them: waiting. They were quiet, not subdued; strongly alive. There was no need to talk. After a while Vusi fetched his saxophone and it spoke, gently. There was a summer storm coming up, first the single finger of a tree’s branch paddling thick air, then the land expelling great breaths in gusts, common brown birds flinging themselves wildly, a raw, fresh-cut scent of rain falling somewhere else. So beautiful, the temperament of the earth. Waiting, they saw the rain, dangling over the pale spools that were the power station towers.

Ms Dot Lamb, chairperson of the Residents’ Association of the suburb where, if an outlaw can be said to have taken up residence, this one seemed to have a base, since it kept returning there, requested an interview with the town councillor whom the residents had voted into office to protect their property and interests. The promise given by him produced no result — as if to show how little it felt itself threatened by the councillor, the creature ‘cleaned up’ as a resident put it, an entire bed of artichokes cultivated from imported seed for table use as an elegant first course. Ms Lamb called a meeting of the Association. She was a woman who got things done; the residents were people who wanted things done for them, without having to take the trouble themselves. It was she who had rallied them to contest the plan to build a home for spastic children among their houses. She had won (for them) the battle to stop toilets for blacks being built at the blacks’ suburban bus terminus, making a strong case that this convenience, far from promoting public decency, would merely encourage the number of blacks who gathered to drink among the natural flora of the koppies that was such a treasured feature of the suburb. Now these koppies were being used by an escaped ape as well. Was it for this that ratepayers had been notified of increases in property taxes envisaged for the coming year? Valuable pets, loved companions of children, had been killed. People feared to leave small children to play in their own gardens.

The residents authorised Ms Lamb to take further steps. She wanted no more shilly-shallying with the so-called proper channels. She went straight to the local police station, kicked up a fuss, and actually got the superintendent to send two armed white policemen and a couple of black ones to mount a search along the ridge of koppies behind some of the finest homes in the suburb. They rounded up several illicit liquor sellers and arrested fifteen men without passes, but did not find what they had been instructed to.

The SPCA protested that an animal should not be hunted and shot by the police, like a criminal. Zoo officials offered to try and dart it. If, as a number of people insisted, it was an ape, it would find a safe home in the new ape-house, where at 3 p.m. every day the inmates perform a tea party for the amusement of children of all races.

Eddie went to the road and thumbed a lift in the African way, flagging a whole arm from waist level as if directing a motor race. He was wearing his Wild West jacket. Vusi and Charles were still asleep — some people can pass the time, waiting, by sleeping more — but Joy saw him go. Her hands tingled with anguish, as if she were going to be sick. She did not wake the others and did not know if she was doing what was right. She did not know whether, when they woke up, she would pretend she had not seen Eddie.