Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

They made Hirsch and his boy get out of the car, but Hirsch, watching and listening to the explosive vehemence between his boy and the crowd, clung to the edge of a desperate, icy confidence: the boy was explaining to them — one of their own people. They did not actually hold Hirsch, but they stood around him, men whose nostrils moved in and out as they breathed; big-breasted warriors from the washtub who looked at him, spoke together, and spat; even children, who filled up the spaces between the legs so that the stirring human press that surrounded him was solid and all alive. ‘Tell them, can’t you?’ he kept appealing, encouragingly.

‘Where’s your pass?’

‘His pass, his pass!’ the women began to yell.

‘Where’s your pass?’ the man who had caught Phillip through the car window screamed in his face.

And he yelled back, too quickly, ‘I’ve burned it! It’s burned! I’ve finished with the pass!’

The women began to pull at his clothes. The men might have let him go, but the women set upon his fine city clothes as if he were an effigy. They tore and poked and snatched, and there — perhaps they had not really been looking for it or expected it — at once, fell the passbook. One of them ran off with it through the crowd, yelling and holding it high and hitting herself on the breast with it. People began to fight over it, like a souvenir. ‘Burn! Burn!’ ‘Kill him!’

Somebody gave Phillip a felling blow aimed for the back of his neck, but whoever it was was too short to reach the target and the blow caught him on the shoulder blade instead.

‘O my God, tell them, tell them, your own people!’ Hirsch was shouting angrily. With a perfect, hypnotising swiftness — the moment of survival, when the buck outleaps the arc of its own strength past the lion’s jaws — his boy was in the car, and with a shuddering rush of power, shaking the men off as they came, crushing someone’s foot as the tyres scudded madly, drove on.

‘Come back!’ Hirsch’s voice, although he could not hear it, swelled so thick in his throat it almost choked him. ‘Come back, I tell you!’ Beside him and around him, the crowd ran. Their mouths were wide, and he did not know for whom they were clamouring — himself or the boy.

When the duplicating machine was brought into the house, Bamjee said, ‘Isn’t it enough that you’ve got the Indians’ troubles on your back?’ Mrs Bamjee said, with a smile that showed the gap of a missing tooth but was confident all the same, ‘What’s the difference, Yusuf? — we’ve all got the same troubles.’

‘Don’t tell me that. We don’t have to carry passes; let the natives protest against passes on their own, there are millions of them. Let them go ahead with it.’

The nine Bamjee and Pahad children were present at this exchange as they were always; in the small house that held them all there was no room for privacy for the discussion of matters they were too young to hear, and so they had never been too young to hear anything. Only their sister and half-sister, Girlie, was missing; she was the eldest, and married. The children looked expectantly, unalarmed and interested, at Bamjee, who had neither left the dining room nor settled down again to the task of rolling his own cigarettes, which had been interrupted by the arrival of the duplicator. He looked at the thing that had come hidden in a wash-basket and conveyed in a black man’s taxi, and the children turned on it, too, their black eyes surrounded by thick lashes like those still, open flowers with hairy tentacles that close on whatever touches them.

‘A fine thing to have on the dining-room table,’ was all he said at last. They smelled the machine among them; a smell of cold black grease. He went out, heavily on tiptoe, in his troubled way.

‘It’s going to go nicely on the sideboard!’ Mrs Bamjee was busy making a place by removing the two pink glass vases filled with plastic carnations and the hand-painted velvet runner with the picture of the Taj Mahal.

After supper she began to run off leaflets on the machine. The family lived in the dining room — the three other rooms in the house were full of beds — and they were all there. The older children shared a bottle of ink while they did their homework, and the two little ones pushed a couple of empty milk bottles in and out the legs of chairs. The three-year-old fell asleep and was carted away by one of the girls. They all drifted off to bed eventually; Bamjee himself went before the older children — he was a fruit and vegetable hawker and was up at half past four every morning to get to the market by five.

‘Not long now,’ said Mrs Bamjee. The older children looked up and smiled at him. He turned his back on her. She still wore the traditional clothing of a Muslim woman, and her body, which was scraggy and unimportant as a dress on a peg when it was not host to a child, was wrapped in the trailing rags of a cheap sari, and her thin black plait was greased. When she was a girl, in the Transvaal town where they lived still, her mother fixed a chip of glass ruby in her nostril; but she had abandoned that adornment as too old-style, even for her, long ago.

She was up until long after midnight, turning out leaflets. She did it as if she might have been pounding chillies.

Bamjee did not have to ask what the leaflets were. He had read the papers. All the past week Africans had been destroying their passes and then presenting themselves for arrest. Their leaders were jailed on charges of incitement, campaign offices were raided — someone must be helping the few minor leaders who were left to keep the campaign going without offices or equipment. What was it the leaflets would say — ‘Don’t go to work tomorrow’, ‘Day of Protest’, ‘Burn Your Pass for Freedom’? He didn’t want to see.

He was used to coming home and finding his wife sitting at the dining-room table deep in discussion with strangers or people whose names were familiar by repute. Some were prominent Indians, like the lawyer, Dr Abdul Mohammed Khan, or the big businessman, Mr Moonsamy Patel, and he was flattered, in a suspicious way, to meet them in his house. As he came home from work next day he met Dr Khan coming out of the house, and Dr Khan — a highly educated man — said to him, ‘A wonderful woman’. But Bamjee had never caught his wife out in any presumption; she behaved properly, as any Muslim woman should, and once her business with such gentlemen was over would never, for instance, have sat down to eat with them.

He found her now back in the kitchen, setting about the preparation of dinner and carrying on a conversation on several different wavelengths with the children. ‘It’s really a shame if you’re tired of lentils, Jimmy, because that’s what you’re getting — Amina, hurry up, get a pot of water going — don’t worry, I’ll mend that in a minute, just bring the yellow cotton, and there’s a needle in the cigarette box on the sideboard.’

‘Was that Dr Khan leaving?’ said Bamjee.

‘Yes, there’s going to be a stay-at-home on Monday. Desai’s ill, and he’s got to get the word around by himself. Bob Jali was up all last night printing leaflets, but he’s gone to have a tooth out.’ She had always treated Bamjee as if it were only a mannerism that made him appear uninterested in politics, the way some woman will persist in interpreting her husband’s bad temper as an endearing gruffness hiding boundless goodwill, and she talked to him of these things just as she passed on to him neighbours’ or family gossip.

‘What for do you want to get mixed up with these killings and stonings and I don’t know what? Congress should keep out of it. Isn’t it enough with the Group Areas?’