Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

Vusi’s dreaming face, that had so little to do with the temporal level of his thoughts and actions, took the wash of crude 60-watt light from the chandelier, suddenly in the doorway. The face appeared to her as a wave of phosphorescence in the dark wake of the house around her movements might reveal a head from a submerged statue. Eddie and woolly Charles came up behind him.

She had no breath left, her mouth was open in a panting smile. ‘Come on.’ It could only be Eddie she summoned.

She went on dancing.

Eddie was standing there.

Slowly, Eddie began to stir to life, first from the hips, then with this-way-and-that slither and stub of the feet, then with the pelvis, the buttocks, the elbows, the knees, and as his whole body and head revived, moved to her.

Eddie and Joy were dancing.

Charles could dance only when drunk; a performing bear, round and round; sometimes some girl’s teddy bear. He stretched out on the sofa, occupying Eddie’s end as well, and smiled at them encouragingly. He might have been a father happily embarrassed to see a neglected daughter coming out of herself.

Before the tape ended Vusi fetched his saxophone. That voice that was strangely his own entered the room ahead of him, playing along with the beat, speaking to them all, one last time.

When signs were not noted for a week or so in a suburb where the fugitive had been active, residents there at once lost interest in having it trapped. So long as it attacked other people’s cats and dogs, frightened other people’s maids — that was other people’s affair. Indignation and complaints shifted from suburb to suburb, from the affluent to the salaried man. The creature was no snob; or no respecter of persons, whichever way you cared to look at it. The policeman’s venison in a lower-income-group housing estate, a pedigree Shih Tzu carried away when let out for its late-night leg-lift in an Inanda rose garden — each served equally as means of survival. And the creature never went beyond the bounds of white Johannesburg. Like the contract labourers who had to leave their families to find work where work was, like the unemployed who were endorsed out to where there was no work and somehow kept getting back in through the barbed strands of Influx Control; like all those who are the uncounted doubling of census figures for Soweto and Tembisa and Natalspruit and Alexandra townships, it was canny about where it was possible somehow to exist off the pickings of plenty. And if charity does not move those who have everything to spare, fear will. All the residents of the suburbs wanted was for the animal to be confined in its appropriate place, that’s all, zoo or even circus. They were prepared to pay for this to be done. (But the owner of the largest circus that travels the country said it was unlikely an ape that had learnt to fend for itself in a hostile environment would be ever again psychologically amenable to training.)

Almost two months had passed since a thirteen-year-old schoolboy had been the first to sight the creature while playing with friends in the family swimming pool. Arriving as a result of somebody’s lack of vigilance, it seemed to some people the menace might be trapped for ever in refuge among them, as an eel may fall by hazard into a well on its migratory nocturnal wriggle towards a suitable environment and survive for many years, growing enormous, down out of reach. It was inevitable that when it was worth a line or two in the papers, now, the creature was facetiously dubbed King Kong, and sometimes even King Kong of the mink-and-manure belt, although it had been seen only once, and then first by a horse, causing the horse to bolt with owner-rider, in the country estate area of the far Northern Suburbs. Former wife of the chairman of a public relations company, the rider was known to her friends as quite a gal, and typically she wheeled the horse and rode after the thing through a eucalyptus plantation, but never caught up or caught more than a glimpse of something dark. Anyway, that was no King Kong; what she’d chased was about the size of the average dwarf.

In the opinion of a zoologist, a monkey, baboon or ape may survive on the koppies round about Johannesburg, in summer, yes. But when the Highveld winter comes. . Simiadae suffer from the common cold, die of pneumonia, like people — just like people.

One day, they disappeared.

The back bedroom was empty and nobody slept on the mattresses or read Africa Undermined by the light of the goose-neck lamp between them. Joy tugged the badly hung curtains across the windows and closed the door quietly as she went out. She could have moved in there, now, but didn’t. She and Charles kept each other company, lying in the dark in the front bedroom and thinking in silence about Vusi and Eddie. He said to her once: ‘One thing — you and I have been closer to those two than we’ll ever be to anyone else in our lives, I don’t care who that might be.’

It might be the lovers they once were, the lovers to come; wife, husband, children.

Once or twice in the following nights Charles went to Vusi and Eddie in the small hours. ‘They say I shouldn’t, any more. It’s right; there’s danger that might lead someone to them.’ Only then did he add the conclusion — his conclusion and hers — to what he had said in the dark. ‘And most likely we’ll never see them again.’

There was not much to tidy up. It was just a careful routine matter of making sure there was nothing by which anyone could be identified. Neither to have it lying about nor in one’s possession or on one’s person: he stopped her from folding up her conch-printed cloth, now familiarly wrinkled from its use on the sofa. ‘Well, I’ll just let it stay where it is, then.’

‘No you won’t. Haven’t you got some kind of dress or something of that stuff? Your preggy outfit? You’ve been seen wearing the same material.’

During the last few weeks, she had taken the precaution of making herself a loose shirt to disguise her lack of belly when she went shopping and might meet Mrs Naas Klopper. So there was another bonfire, this time down at what had once been the Kleynhans piggery. The cloth burned in patches; pieces, eaten into shapes by the flames, kept escaping destruction. Again, Joy had a branch with which to poke them back into the furnace heart of the fire. It served her right for carrying unnecessary possessions with her into a situation too different, from anything known, to be imagined in advance.

‘But if you can’t go to them any more, will they have enough food to last out?’ And she, in what she thought of as her stupidity, her left-over dilettantism of austerity, not realising you eat while you can, had started off by buying them cheap sausages!

Charles was tearing apart the spines of a few books, with marginal notes in Vusi’s handwriting, they had left behind. Feeding a fire with books was something he could not have believed he would ever do.

He stopped, with the peculiar weight of helplessness big men are subject to, when they must hold back. ‘Eddie says he’ll manage.’

She looked, in alarm.

‘Vusi has his mind on only one thing. I don’t think he cares whether he eats or not, now.’

The cotton cloth gave off the smell of its dye as it smouldered — the natural dye made from the indigo berry, she had been told like any tourist when she bought it in the other African country where she had received her new surname and passport on her way back to where she had been born. Now Eddie and Vusi, who were not known to her then, even under those names, were somewhere she had never seen. Charles had tried to describe it; she marvelled that it could have been adapted and wondered if it could possibly be maintained long enough. Charles explained that Vusi and Eddie would have to wait until the day, the hour, in which the exact coincidence of their preparedness, contingency arrangements, and the gap in the routine Vusi had studied, arrived. Vusi had this charted in his head as precisely as an analemma on a sundial.