Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

Phillip was not worried, either. When the men in the location came to the door to urge him to destroy his pass, he was away on the road, and only his wife was at home to assure them that he had done so; when some policeman in a dorp stopped him to see it, there it was, in the inner pocket of the rayon lining of his jacket. And one day, when this campaign or another was successful, he would never need to carry it again.

At every call they made on that trip, people were eager for news of what was happening in Johannesburg. Old barefoot men in the dignity of battered hats came from the yards behind the stores, trembling with dread and wild hope. Was it true that so many people were burning their passes that the police couldn’t arrest them all? Was it true that in such-and-such a location people had gone to the police station and left passes in a pile in front of the door? Was it the wild young men who called themselves Africanists who were doing this? Or did Congress want it, did the old Chief, Luthuli, call for it too?

‘We are going to free you all of the pass,’ Phillip found himself declaiming. Children, hanging about, gave the Congress raised-thumb salute. ‘The white man won’t bend our backs like yours, old man.’ They could see for themselves how much he had already taken from the white man, wearing the same clothes as the white man, driving the white man’s big car — an emissary from the knowledgeable, political world of the city, where black men were learning to be masters. Even Hirsch’s cry, ‘Phillip, get a move on there!’, came as an insignificant interruption, a relic of the present almost become the past.

Over the border, in the British protectorate, Bechuanaland, the interest was just as high. Phillip found it remarkably easy to talk to the little groups of men who approached him in the luxurious dust that surrounded village buildings, the kitchen boys who gathered in country hotel yards where cats fought beside glittering mounds of empty beer bottles. ‘We are going to see that this is the end of the pass. The struggle for freedom — the white man won’t stand on our backs — ’

It was a long, hot trip. Hirsch, pale and exhausted, dozed and twitched in his sleep between one dorp and the next. For the last few months he had been putting pills instead of sugar into his tea, and he no longer drank the endless bottles of lemonade and ginger beer that he had sent the boy to buy at every stop for as long as he could remember. There was a strange, sweetish smell that seemed to follow Hirsch around these days; it settled in the car on that long trip and was there even when Hirsch wasn’t; but Phillip, who, like most travellers’ boys, slept in the car at night, soon got used to it.

They went as far as Francistown, where, all day, while they were in and out of the long line of stores facing the railway station, a truckload of Herero women from further north in the Kalahari Desert sat beside the road in their Victorian dress, turbaned, unsmiling, stiff and voluminous, like a row of tea cosies. The travelling salesmen did not go on to Rhodesia. From Francistown they turned back for Johannesburg, with a stop overnight at Palapye Road, so that they could make a detour to Serowe, an African town of round mud houses, dark euphorbia hedges and tinkling goat bells, where the deposed chief and his English wife lived on a hill in a large house with many bathrooms, but there was no hotel. The hotel in Palapye Road was a fly-screened box on the railway station, and Hirsch spent a bad night amid the huffing and blowing of trains taking water and the bursts of stamping — a gigantic Spanish dance — of shunting trains.

They left for home early on Friday morning. By half-past five in the afternoon they were flying along towards the outskirts of Johannesburg, with the weary heat of the day blowing out of the windows in whiffs of high land and the sweat suddenly deliciously cool on their hands and foreheads. The row of suits on the rack behind them slid obediently down and up again with each rise and dip accomplished in the turn of the road. The usual landmarks, all in their places, passed unlooked at: straggling, small-enterprise factories, a brickfield, a chicken farm, the rose nursery with the toy Dutch windmill, various gatherings of low, patchy huts and sagging houses — small locations where the blacks who worked round about lived. At one point, the road closely skirted one of these places; the children would wave and shout from where they played in the dirt. Today, quite suddenly, a shower of stones came from them. For a moment Hirsch truly thought that he had become aware of a sudden summer hailstorm; he was always so totally enclosed by the car it would not have been unusual for him not to have noticed a storm rising. He put his hand on the handle that raised the window; instantly, a sharp grey chip pitted the fold of flesh between thumb and first finger.

‘Drive on,’ he yelled, putting the blood to his mouth. ‘Drive on!’ But his boy, Phillip, had at the same moment seen what they had blundered into. Fifty yards ahead a labouring green bus, its windows, under flapping canvas, crammed with black heads, had lurched to a stop. It appeared to burst as people jumped out at doors and windows; from the houses, a jagged rush of more people met them and spread around the bus over the road.

Phillip stopped the car so fiercely that Hirsch was nearly pitched through the windscreen. With a roar the car reversed, swinging off the road sideways on to the veld, and then swung wildly around on to the road again, facing where it had come from. The steering wheel spun in the ferocious, urgent skill of the pink-and-brown hands. Hirsch understood and anxiously trusted; at the feel of the car righting itself, a grin broke through in his boy’s face.

But as Phillip’s suede shoe was coming down on the accelerator, a black hand in a greasy, buttonless coat sleeve seized his arm through the window, and the car rocked with the weight of the bodies that flung and clung against it. When the engine stalled, there was quiet; the hand let go of Phillip’s arm. The men and women around the car were murmuring to themselves, pausing for breath; their power and indecision gave Hirsch the strongest feeling he had ever had in his life, a sheer, pure cleavage of terror that, as he fell apart, exposed — tiny kernel, his only defence, his only hope, his only truth — the will to live. ‘You talk to them,’ he whispered, rapping it out, confidential, desperately confident. ‘You tell them — one of their own people, what can they want with you? Make it right. Let them take the stuff. Anything, for God’s sake. You understand me? Speak to them.’

‘They can’t want nothing with this car,’ Phillip was saying loudly and in a superior tone. ‘This car is not the government.’

But a woman’s shrill demand came again and again, and apparently it was to have them out. ‘Get out, come on, get out,’ came threateningly, in English, at Hirsch’s window, and at his boy’s side a heated, fast-breathing exchange in their own language.

Phillip’s voice was injured, protesting, and angry. ‘What do you want to stop us for? We’re going home from a week selling on the road. Any harm in that? I work for him, and I’m driving back to Jo’burg. Come on now, clear off. I’m a Congress man myself—’

A thin woman broke the hearing with a derisive sound like a shake of castanets at the back of her tongue. ‘Congress! Everybody can say. Why you’re working?’

And a man in a sweatshirt, with a knitted woollen cap on his head, shouted, ‘Stay-at-home. Nobody but traitors work today. What are you driving the white man for?’

‘I’ve just told you, man, I’ve been away a week in Bechuanaland. I must get home somehow, mustn’t I? Finish this, man, let us get on, I tell you.’