Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

The ape family is not exactly omnivorous. Like the human animal, it is able to adapt its eating habits to changes of environment. If the creature had been a pet, or kept in any other form of captivity normal for a creature whose needs must be subordinate to the dominant human species, the diet supplied to it would have been fruit, vegetables and some cereal, probably stale bread. It also would have developed, as creatures do in mournful compensation for what they cannot tell those who keep them caged or secured by a chain to a perch, yearnings transformed into addiction to certain tidbits. Although members of the ape family are generally vegetarian in their wild state, in times of drought, for example, they will eat anything their agility and the strength of their hands equip them to catch; and in captivity this atavistic (so to speak) memory can be seen to rouse from quiet masturbation a perfectly well-fed blue-bottomed baboon in the Johannesburg zoo, whose prehensile bolt of lightning strikes down any pigeon who flies through the cage on the lookout for crumbs — he tears it apart instantly. The instinct must have been what returned to the fugitive when, in early weeks on the run, it killed or maimed dogs and cats. This surely was a period of great fear. Humans are the source of the terror of capture; a dog or cat is an intermediary who represents the lesser risk. To kill a suburban dog or cat is to destroy the enemy’s envoy as well as to eat.

But after a while the creature changed its tastes. Or became more confident? Sergeant Abel van Niekerk and Constables Gqueka, Mcunu and Manaka had not been able to catch it. It had feasted on venison.

Now it lived by raiding dustbins; if not carelessly bold, then desperate. It still frequented the affluent suburbs where first seen, although now and then a sortie into the working-class white suburbs was again reported. Most likely it was from that class of home it had escaped (though no one was admitting any responsibility) because along with racing pigeons, rabbits, etc., an ape is a lower-income-group pet, conferring a distinction (that man who goes around with his tame monkey) on people who haven’t much hope of attaining it as a company director or television personality.

A left-wing writer, taking up a sense of unfortunate duty to speak out on such paradoxes, wrote a stinging article noting sentimentality over a homeless animal, while — she gave precise figures — hundreds of thousands of black people had no adequate housing and were bulldozed out of the shelters they made for themselves. Some people of conservative views had a different attitude which nevertheless also expressed irritation with animal lovers and conservationists, who were more concerned about the welfare of a bloody ape than the peace and security one paid through the nose for in a high-class suburb well isolated from the other nuisances — white working-class, black, Indian or coloured townships. The monkey or whatever it was was in self-imposed exile. If it had been content to stay chained in a yard or caged in a zoo, its proper station in life, it wouldn’t have had to live the life of an outlaw. If one might presume to do so without making oneself absurd by speaking in such terms of something less than human — well, serve the damn thing right.

Charles had found the cave. He had searched the veld within three or four kilometres of the power station, carrying a mining geologist’s hammer and bag as the perfectly ordinary answer to anyone who might wonder what he was doing.

And he had found it. They called it ‘the cave’, right from the first night he took them there to see if it would do, but it wasn’t a cave at all. It was the end of a rocky outcrop that sloped away underground into the grassland of the Highveld, sticking up unobtrusively from it like part of the steep deck of a wreck that is all that remains visible of a huge submerged liner of the past. Some growth had huddled round for the shelter of the lion-coloured rocks in winter, and the moisture condensed there in summer. In daylight, they saw the covering of leathery, rigid, black-green leaves, with a rusty sheen of hairs where the backs curled; to Charles, whose taxonomic habit would always assert itself, no matter how irrelevantly, wild plum in a favourite quartzite and shale habitat. Another muscular rope of a tree with dark thick leaves had split a great rock vertically but held it together; the rock fig. All this tough foliage, exposed to heat and frost without the protective interventions of cultivation, more natural than any garden growth, looked exactly like its antithesis — the indestructible synthetic leaves of artificial plants under neon lights. Hidden by it was a kind of shallow dugout which Charles thought to have been made by cattle (who will easily form a depression with the weight and shape of their bodies) at some time when this stretch of veld had been farmed. But when, those nights between midnight and dawn, he and Vusi and Eddie had used their picks to dig a pit, they had fallen through into what was (Charles saw) unmistakably an old stope. There were rough-dressed eucalyptus planks holding up the earth that sifted down on their heads as they tunnelled on a bit. Eddie found a tin teaspoon, its thickness doubled by rust. Vusi’s pick broke an old liquor bottle; there was a trade name cast in relief by the mould in which the bottle had been made: Hatherley Distillery .

Charles had never heard of it: must be a very old bottle. ‘Ja. . So somebody worked a claim here, once. . Long ago. I’d say round about ninety years. They came running from all over the world, and worked these little claims.’

‘White men.’ Eddie confirmed what went without saying.

‘Yes. Oh yes — Germans and Frenchmen and Americans and Australians. As well as Englishmen. After the discovery of gold they poured into the Transvaal. Digging under every stone, sifting gravel in every river bed. But in the end only the financiers with capital to buy machinery for deep-level mining had a chance to get rich, eh.’

Eddie, by the hooded light of one of those lamps truck drivers set up when their vehicles break down on a freeway, patted the dust out of his thick pad of hair. ‘D’you think there’s still gold in this stuff?’

‘Not in commercially viable quantities.’ Charles wore a mock-shrewd face. ‘Looks more like iron ore, to me, anyway. .’

‘Man, I never thought this thing would end up landing me working in the mines.’

Vusi stopped digging and grinned slowly, over Eddie’s charm, gave an applauding click of the tongue.

As their brothers had for generations carried coal and sacks of potatoes, they unloaded and stowed in the pit they had dug the AKM assault rifles and bayonets, the grey limpet mines with detonators and timing devices, the defensive and offensive hand grenades. The pit was lined and covered with plastic sheeting and covered again with earth, grasses and small shrubs uprooted in the dark. The shelter for the two men was far less elaborately constructed. The stope was there; with Charles they hitched a sheet of plastic overhead to hold the loose earth and put down a couple of blankets off the mattresses in the back bedroom, some tins of food and packs of cigarettes. The entrance to the stope, already concealed on all but one side by the rocks, was covered with branches cut from the single freestanding tree that grew among them. (With another part of his mind, Charles identified, while hacking away at it, the Transvaal elm or white stinkwood, which would have grown much taller near water.)

They could not make fires. But before Vusi decided that his night visits should cease, Charles brought them a very small camper gas-ring, which was safe to use well back in the stope and during the day only, when any light from its tiny crown of blue flame would be absorbed in the light of the sun. That light had never seemed so total and shadowless, to them. It laid their silent rocks open like a sacrificial altar to a high hot sky from which even the faintest gauze of cloud was burned away. It surrounded them with a clarity in which they were the only things concealed, the only things it couldn’t get at. At first they could not come out at all into the sun’s Colossus eye, a fly’s a million times faceted, that revealed the minutely striated smoothness of one tube of grass, the combination of colours that made up a flake of verdigris on a stone, the bronze collar on the carapace of a beetle working through a cake of cow dung. Then they found a narrow cleft where, one at a time, they could lie hidden and get some air through the overhang of coarse dusty leaves. Impossible for anyone straying past to see a human figure in there. If cows had used the shallow dugout to rest in, herdsmen, the boy children or old men who couldn’t earn money in the cities, must have rested here, too. Both Vusi and Eddie had grown up in the black locations of industrial cities and had never spent days whose passing was marked only by the movement of cattle over the veld and the movement of the sun over the cattle. Eddie lay, in his turn, on the shelf among the rocks, in this — crazy — peace: now . What a time to feel such a thing; how was it possible that it still existed, with what was waiting, and buried, there in the pit.