Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

Eddie was there before dark.

Vusi and Charles were playing chess and Joy was burning rubbish in the front garden. So she was first to see him come as she was first to know he had gone. She had a broken branch and went on poking at whatever was burning until he had to pass her on his way up to the house. She put up a folded hand with her usual effacing gesture, smiling, not aware that she smeared the cobweb of flying ashes that had settled on her forehead. ‘Hello.’

If she wouldn’t ask any questions, he would.

Eddie stopped. ‘What’s that for?’

She was better-looking with the waves of flame melting the narrow definitions of her face, colouring and rounding it. ‘A rat came into the bathroom. They’re breeding in that pile of junk we threw out of the shed. I had to lug everything round here.’

He nodded. He had been away, but at once was together with her, with the others, again, in the knowledge that no fire could be made near what was behind the new garage door.

He went on to the house.

They must have heard him talking to Joy. They must have decided to talk it out calmly, but Charles struggled up from under his own self-control, the chessmen rolled over the floor. ‘Are you bloody mad?’ He was gone from the room.

Vusi did not seem to see Charles; opened his mouth dryly and closed it again.

Eddie dribbled one of the chessmen with the toe of his running shoe. He went out to the kitchen, and came back with a beer. Charles was there, gathering up the chessmen.

The release of gas from the beer can as he pierced it was like an opening exclamation from Eddie. ‘Well, nothing happened. I went to town, I’m back.’

Vusi was silent, withholding his attention.

Charles had his big body safely chained down on a stool. ‘I’m sorry. But it’s clear you know what you did, what risk you took for us all.’

‘There’s nothing to worry about. Nothing happened .’ Eddie spoke to Vusi. He had to reach Vusi. It was Vusi to whom they were all responsible, even in collective responsibility; Vusi, not Charles, to whom Joy had had to say she had seen Eddie take a lift, on the road, early in the morning. ‘I didn’t go to see anyone. You can believe that.’

Vusi gave a slow blink to dismiss any suggestion of mistrust. Eddie’s presence was acknowledged. ‘That’s not the question, man. You could have been picked up.’

‘Well, I wasn’t.’

Joy came in and saw they were not quarrelling; it was no more possible for them to dare quarrel than for her to have made her bonfire near the shed. Discipline was the molecular pattern that attracted them back to their particular association. If Eddie had been picked up, even if he had not been recognised as a banned exile who had infiltrated, and had got away with being jailed as an ordinary pass-offender (the papers he had been provided with described him as a farm labourer and did not permit him to look for work in an urban area), the pattern would have been distorted. Vusi could not function without Eddie, Eddie and Vusi without Charles and Joy, Charles and Joy without Eddie and Vusi. The entity reconstituted itself irresistibly, there among the sofa covered with the conch-design cloth, the armchair that had become Vusi’s, the fake ox-wagon wheel with its fly-haloed pink hats; there was no sending it flying apart, from within, by attacking (with the sort of open reproaches any ordinary relationship would withstand) the component — Eddie — that was once more in place, at the Kleynhans place.

The white pair later heard Vusi talking for a long time in his and Eddie’s language in the second bedroom. Each made a mental translation, according to what they themselves would have been saying to Eddie, of what Vusi would be saying in the low cadence that seemed to vibrate the thin walls of the house like some swarm settled under the tin roof. Charles was giving him the hell he couldn’t, aloud; above all, how could the kid Eddie risk Vusi , Vusi who had been operational before, who knew his job, who was needed to stay alive and had managed to survive four times the near certainty of imprisonment and death his job carried. Joy was asking why: if Eddie really knew why he was here — the reasons of his own life, of the lives of all his people for generations — then how could he have an impulse to drop back into the meek or loudmouth compliance of the streets, still under that same magisterial authority of someone’s long-dead white grandfather? Poor Eddie. It could only be because he had not understood properly why he had to be here and nowhere else; not taking advantage of slowly evolving opportunities to advance himself in the black business community, or to avail himself, at newly established technikons for blacks, of what, after all, were necessary skills for the service of his people, or to join the elite of black doctors allowed to practise only in black areas or black lawyers barred from taking chambers in white areas where the courts were. She could testify, in herself. She would not have been here if she had not found her own re-education, after the school where she had sung for God to save white South Africa. Without that re-education she would not have come to know for herself, for certain, that she could not now be bearing classified children (white) while living in a white suburb like that of the house with a view where she had grown up. She could not be anywhere but on the Kleynhans plot with a view of the power station.

That evening there was the rather prim atmosphere in the house that surrounds someone who has been drunk and now has slept it off. Eddie appeared, sobered of his single repetition, Nothing happened . Vusi must have told him that if he couldn’t stand the Kleynhans place any longer, that was all right, because from tomorrow the three men would be out every night from midnight until just before dawn. It had been Charles’s turn to cook (they had solved the problem of which sex was suited to the kitchen by having a roster) and, in spite of what sort of day it had been, he had made a mutton stew. Eddie loved mutton; but of course it had not been made with a treat for him in mind.

After they had eaten, the men went out into the yard. The moon was not yet risen. The light from the kitchen window touched shallowly the zinc glint of the garage door as it rolled up sufficiently for them to duck in. It rattled down behind them. Eddie didn’t think it was working smoothly enough. ‘Better get us some oil, Charlie, or it’s soon going to rust.’ Charles raised eyebrows, opened nostrils, swallowed a yawn, a man without tenure. While they were checking the heavy picks, the spades and black plastic sheeting Charles had laid in ready for the end of waiting, Joy didn’t mind doing the washing-up on her own for once. If there was something practical to plan, the men liked to do it behind the outhouse door, where they were in tactile reach of the means by which what they were discussing was to be realised.

They were gone a long time. She took a beer from the fridge with her to the living room and turned on Eddie’s tape player, which was always beside his end of the sofa as a pipe smoker will have his paraphernalia handy on a chair-arm. After she had told Vusi about seeing Eddie hitch a lift, she had made it possible for herself to keep out of everyone’s way, all day. In order not to be with Vusi and Charles, not to sit around with them in that same room, or to be in the bedroom which was, after all, Charles’s room as well, she had dragged cardboard boxes, rags, old bones, torn Afrikaans newspapers the black man who used to live in the yard had collected, to the front garden and made her bonfire among the broken poles of the pergola. Now she felt the comfort of being together with them once more — all three of them, Vusi, Charles and Eddie, although they were not in the room with her. The music was whatever Eddie had left in the player; a tape with a strong beat. All on her own, she began to dance, smiling to herself as if to others dancing towards and away from her. She worked off her sandals without pausing, and danced on the nap of the ugly rug Charles had bought along with the job-lot ‘suite’ to make a show to the Naas Kloppers of the district that the house was meant really to be lived in. Rhythm tossed her head and the knot of hair loosened and slowly unravelled, then swung from shoulder to shoulder. She threw her glasses on to Vusi’s chair. At night, moths circled in place of flies above the lop-sided pink shades, falling singed; her bare feet trod one now and then. Her small breasts rose and fell against her chest like a necklace; she swooped and shook, swayed and softly sang.