Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

Charles and Joy could sit on the front stoep, now, in the evenings, like any other plot owners taking the air. They sat drinking beer and she tried to visualise for herself where she had never seen, gazing way off, as to a horizon of mountains, at the only feature of the Kleynhans place view, the towers of the power station whose curved planes signalled after-light back to the sunken sun, and above whose height toy puffs of smoke were congealed by distance.

And then the man came on his bicycle to see how his mealies were doing. Charles and Joy were helping themselves to bread and coffee, in the kitchen, at seven in the morning; even Charles had not slept well. They saw him cautiously wheel the bicycle behind the shed, and then appear, sticking his neck out, withdrawing it, sticking it out, like a nervous rooster. He went up to the door of his old room and called softly, in his language. They watched him.

‘Oh Christ.’

‘I’ll go.’ Joy slept in an outsize T-shirt; she put her Indian skirt over it and went out into the yard with the right amount of white madam manner, not enough to be too repugnant to her, not too little to seem normal to the former Kleynhans labourer.

‘Yes? Do you want something?’

Mild as her presence was, it clamped him by the leg; caught there, he took off his hat and greeted her in Afrikaans. ‘ Môre missus, môre missus .’

She changed to Afrikaans, too. ‘What it is you want here?’

He shook his head reassuringly, he wanted nothing from the missus, he asked nothing, only where was her boy? He wanted, please, to speak to her boy.

She was like all white missuses, she knew very well whom he meant but she suspected him, they always suspect a strange black man at the door. And she refused to understand because she knew he had something he wasn’t telling — like his mealie patch he’d left on what was now her property. ‘What boy? Which boy d’you mean? What’s his name?’

No, missus, he didn’t know the name — those two boys that work for the baas on the farm, now. Could he please see those boys? They were (in an inspiration, they had suddenly become) his wife’s cousins.

Now the white missus smiled sympathetically. ‘Oh those. No, they don’t work here any more. They’ve gone. My husband has finished with the building, he didn’t need them any longer.’

Gone?

He knew it was no use asking where. When black people leave a white man’s place, they’ve gone, that’s all; it’s not the white man’s business to know where they’ll find work next. Then he had another sudden idea, and again he saw in her face she knew it as soon as he did. ‘Does the baas need a boy for the farm? Me, I’m old Baas Kleynhans’s boy, I’m work here before, long time.’

She was smiling refusal while he pleaded. ‘No, no, I’m sorry. We don’t need anyone. My husband’s got someone coming — next month, yes, from another farm, his brother’s farm—’

They knew exactly how to lie to each other, standing in the yard in which she was the newcomer and he the old inhabitant.

She said it again: she was sorry. . And this gave him the courage of an opening.

‘When I’m here before — after Oubaas Kleynhans he’s die, I’m look after this place. Those mealies’ (he pointed behind him) ‘I’m plant them. And then the other baas he say I must go. Now those boy — your boy — I’m tell them it’s my mealies and they say they can ask you, I can come for those mealies.’

‘Oh the mealie patch? No, I don’t know anything about that. But there are no mealies yet—’ Both her hands turned palm up in smiling patronage.

‘Not now. But when the mealies they’re coming ready, that boy he’s say he going ask you—’

‘You can have the mealies.’

He grinned with nervous disbelief at the ease of his success. ‘The baas he won’t chase me?’

She must be one of those young white women who tell their men what they must do. She was sure: ‘The baas won’t chase you.’

‘When the missus and the baas like to eat some of those mealies, when they coming still green, the missus must take.’

‘Yes, thank you.’ And then, the usual phrase from white people, who are always in a hurry to get things over, who don’t seem to know or take any pleasure in the lingering disengagement that politely concludes a discussion: ‘All right, then, eh?’ And she was gone, back into the kitchen, while, since he hadn’t been chased away, he took this as the permission he hadn’t asked for — to go through the white people’s property to look at his mealies.

Charles and Joy kept checking on whether the bicycle was still there, behind the shed. Half an hour later it was gone, and so must he be, although they had missed witnessing him ride away.

Charles heated up the coffee. He had not appeared before the man; the man would not be able to describe the baas, only the missus and the two boys who had worked for them. Joy blew on her cup. ‘I really think he’s harmless.’

But that was exactly what made him suspect — his humble pretext for having kept an eye on them for weeks, now, his innocent reason for trying to find out where Eddie and Vusi were: perfect opportunities for someone in plainclothes to have picked up a poor farm labourer out of work and offered him a few rands simply in return for telling what and whom he saw on a farm where nothing was growing but his trespassing patch of mealies.

‘And if I had chased him away?’

‘That’d’ve been much worse. For Pete’s sake!’

Once approved, she had natural grounds for pointing out her forethought. ‘I told him someone else was coming to work for us, but only next month. To hold him off and at the same time make the set-up not seem too unnatural.’

Charles opened his hands stiffly, doubtingly, and then made fists of them under his bearded jaw again. ‘Next month.’ That part of the proposition was good enough. The day after you have left a country it will be as remote, as a physical environment in which you may be apprehended, as it will be in a year. Next month would be no more able to reach them than the time, months ahead, when the mealies would be ready for eating. ‘But now he’ll be hanging around. He’ll be arriving every day with his hoe and whatnot. He may bring friends with him.’

‘So it would have been better if you’d gone out and played the heavy baas scene.’

‘I’ve told you, you couldn’t have done anything else.’

The occasional lapses of confidence in herself, that had roused his tenderness when they were lovers, now irritated Charles. You had no business to have gone this far, to be the back-up for Vusi and Eddie — all that meant — if you were still at the stage of allowing yourself self-doubt. But they were alone; no Vusi, no Eddie, and there they had to stay until Charles, on one of his outings in the combi, learnt that arrangements were ready for them to get away, as arrangements, at the beginning, had brought them successfully to Klopper’s Eiendoms Beperk to look for a place in this area. They had only each other, even if it was in an awareness very different from that of the lovers they had been. They had lost the scent of one another’s skin; but the house held them together, this place which they had occupied, not lived in, as in old wars soldiers occupied trenches and stuck up pictures of girls there. Neither said to the other what both felt while going matter-of-factly through this stage of what had been undertaken: some days, a desolate desire to get away from the house, the shed with the shiny roll-down door, the veld where except for the mealie patch, khakiweed filled in the pattern of rows where beans and potatoes had once grown; some hours, a sense of attachment to the room under the ox-wagon wheel chandelier and the curlicues of the pressed lead ceiling where the four of them had spent time that could never be recorded in the annals of ordinary life; to the outhouse they had bricked up together, and even to an aspect neither of them would ever have of any landscape again — the presence of the towers of the power station, away over the veld. This sense of attachment was so strong there seemed, while it lasted, no other reality anywhere to be found.