Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

Praise worked steadily on the last lap. Brother George and Father Audry watched him continuously. He was doing extremely well and seemed quite overcome with the weight of pride and pleasure when Father Audry presented him with a new black fountain pen: this was the pen with which he was to write the matriculation exam. On a Monday afternoon Father Audry, who had been in conference with the Bishop all morning, looked in on his study, where every afternoon the boy would be seen sitting at the table that had been moved in for him. But there was no one there. The books were on the table. A chute of sunlight landed on the seat of the chair. Praise was not found again. The school was searched; and then the police were informed; the boys questioned; there were special prayers said in the mornings and evenings. He had not taken anything with him except the fountain pen.

When everything had been done there was nothing but silence; nobody mentioned the boy’s name. But Father Audry was conducting investigations on his own. Every now and then he would get an idea that would bring a sudden hopeful relief. He wrote to Adelaide Graham-Grigg‘. . what worries me — I believe the boy may have been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I am hunting everywhere. .’; was it possible that he might make his way to the Protectorate? She was acting as confidential secretary to the Chief, now, but she wrote to say that if the boy turned up she would try to make time to deal with the situation. Father Audry even sought out, at last, the ‘family’ — the people with whom Miss Graham-Grigg had discovered Praise living as a beggar. They had been moved to a new township and it took some time to trace them. He found No. 28b, Block E, in the appropriate ethnic group. He was accustomed to going in and out of African homes and he explained his visit to the old woman in matter-of-fact terms at once, since he knew how suspicious of questioning the people would be. There were no interior doors in these houses and a woman in the inner room who was dressing moved out of the visitor’s line of vision as he sat down. She heard all that passed between Father Audry and the old woman and presently she came in with mild interest.

Out of a silence the old woman was saying ‘My-my-my-my!’ — shaking her head down into her bosom in a stylised expression of commiseration; they had not seen the boy. ‘And he spoke so nice, everything was so nice in the school.’ But they knew nothing about the boy, nothing at all.

The younger woman remarked, ‘Maybe he’s with those boys who sleep in the old empty cars there in town — you know? — there by the beer-hall?’

They had been on the road together seven or eight years, Mondays to Fridays. They did the Free State one week, the northern and eastern Transvaal the next, Natal and Zululand a third. Now and then they did Bechuanaland and Southern Rhodesia and were gone for a month. They sat side by side, for thousands of miles and thousands of hours, the commercial traveller, Hirsch, and his boy. The boy was a youngster when Hirsch took him on, with one pair of grey flannels, a clean shirt and a nervous sniff; he said he’d been a lorry driver, and at least he didn’t stink — ‘When you’re shut up with them in a car all day, believe me, you want to find a native who doesn’t stink.’ Now the boy wore, like Hirsch, the line of American-cut suits that Hirsch carried, and fancy socks, suede shoes and an anti-magnetic watch with a strap of thick gilt links, all bought wholesale. He had an ear of white handkerchief always showing in his breast pocket, though he still economically blew his nose in his fingers when they made a stop out in the veld.

He drove, and Hirsch sat beside him, peeling back the pages of paperbacks, jerking slowly in and out of sleep, or scribbling in his order books. They did not speak. When the car flourished to a stop outside the verandah of some country store, Hirsch got out without haste and went in ahead — he hated to ‘make an impression like a hawker’, coming into a store with his goods behind him. When he had exchanged greetings with the storekeeper and leant on the counter chatting for a minute or two, as if he had nothing to do but enjoy the dimness of the interior, he would stir with a good-humoured sigh: ‘I’d better show you what I’ve got. It’s a shame to drag such lovely stuff about in this dust. Phillip!’ — his face loomed in the doorway a moment — ‘get a move on there.’

So long as it was not raining, Phillip kept one elbow on the rolled-down window, the long forearm reaching up to where his slender hand, shaded like the coat of some rare animal from tea-rose pink on the palm to dark matt brown on the back, appeared to support the car’s gleaming roof like a caryatid. The hand would withdraw, he would swing out of the car on to his feet, he would carry into the store the cardboard boxes, suitcases, and, if the store carried what Hirsch called ‘high-class goods’ as well, the special stand of men’s suits hanging on a rail that was made to fit into the back of the car. Then he would saunter out into the street again, giving his tall shoulders a cat’s pleasurable movement under fur — a movement that conveyed to him the excellent drape of his jacket. He would take cigarettes out of his pocket and lean, smoking, against the car’s warm flank.

Sometimes he held court; like Hirsch, he had become well known on the regular routes. The country people were not exactly shy of him and his kind, but his clothes and his air of city knowhow imposed a certain admiring constraint on them, even if, as in the case of some of the older men and women, they disapproved of the city and the aping of the white man’s ways. He was not above playing a game of mora-baraba , an ancient African kind of draughts, with the blacks from the grain and feed store in a dorp on the Free State run. Hirsch was always a long time in the general store next door, and, meanwhile, Phillip pulled up the perfect creases of his trousers and squatted over the lines of the board drawn with a stone in the dust, ready to show them that you couldn’t beat a chap who had got his training in the big lunch-hour games that are played every day outside the wholesale houses in Johannesburg. At one or two garages, where the petrol attendants in foam-rubber baseball caps given by Shell had picked up a lick of passing sophistication, he sometimes got a poker game. The first time his boss, Hirsch, discovered him at this (Phillip had overestimated the time Hirsch would spend over the quick hand of Klabberyas he was obliged to take, in the way of business, with a local storekeeper), Hirsch’s anger at being kept waiting vanished in a kind of amused and grudging pride. ‘You’re a big fella, now, eh, Phillip? I’ve made a man of you. When you came to me you were a real piccanin. Now you’ve been around so much, you’re taking the boys’ money off them on the road. Did you win?’

‘Ah, no, sir,’ Phillip suddenly lied, with a grin.

‘Ah-h-h, what’s the matter with you? You didn’t win?’ For a moment Hirsch looked almost as if he were about to give him a few tips. After that, he always passed his worn packs of cards on to his boy.

And Phillip learned, as time went by, to say, ‘I don’t like the sound of the engine, boss. There’s something loose there. I’m going to get underneath and have a look while I’m down at the garage taking petrol.’

It was true that Hirsch had taught his boy everything the boy knew, although the years of silence between them in the car had never been broken by conversation or an exchange of ideas. Hirsch was one of those pale, plump, freckled Jews, with pale blue eyes, a thick snub nose and the remains of curly blond hair that had begun to fall out before he was twenty. A number of his best stories depended for their denouement on the fact that somebody or other had not realised that he was a Jew. His pride in this belief that nobody would take him for one was not conventionally anti-Semitic, but based on the reasoning that it was a matter of pride, on the part of the Jewish people, that they could count him among them while he was fitted by nature with the distinguishing characteristics of a more privileged race. Another of his advantages was that he spoke Afrikaans as fluently and idiomatically as any Afrikaner. This, as his boy had heard him explain time and again to English-speaking people, was essential, because, low and ignorant as these back-veld Afrikaners were — hardly better than the natives, most of them — they knew that they had their government up there in power now, and they wouldn’t buy a sixpenny line from you if you spoke the language of the rooineks — the red-neck English.