Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

She laughed. ‘Now, Yusuf, you know you don’t believe that. Look how you said the same thing when the Group Areas started in Natal. You said we should begin to worry when we get moved out of our own houses here in the Transvaal. And then your own mother lost her house in Noorddorp, and there you are; you saw that nobody’s safe. Oh, Girlie was here this afternoon, she says Ismail’s brother’s engaged — that’s nice, isn’t it? His mother will be pleased; she was worried.’

‘Why was she worried?’ asked Jimmy, who was fifteen, and old enough to patronise his mother.

‘Well, she wanted to see him settled. There’s a party on Sunday week at Ismail’s place — you’d better give me your suit to take to the cleaners tomorrow, Yusuf.’

One of the girls presented herself at once. ‘I’ll have nothing to wear, Ma.’

Mrs Bamjee scratched her sallow face. ‘Perhaps Girlie will lend you her pink, eh? Run over to Girlie’s place now and say I say will she lend it to you?’

The sound of commonplaces often does service as security, and Bamjee, going to sit in the armchair with the shiny armrests that was wedged between the dining table and the sideboard, lapsed into an unthinking doze that, like all times of dreamlike ordinariness during those weeks, was filled with uneasy jerks and starts back into reality. The next morning, as soon as he got to market, he heard that Dr Khan had been arrested. But that night Mrs Bamjee sat up making a new dress for her daughter; the sight disarmed Bamjee, reassured him again, against his will, so that the resentment he had been making ready all day faded into a morose and accusing silence. Heaven knew, of course, who came and went in the house during the day. Twice in that week of riots, raids and arrests he found black women in the house when he came home; plain ordinary native women in doeks, drinking tea. This was not a thing other Indian women would have in their homes, he thought bitterly; but then his wife was not like other people, in a way he could not put his finger on, except to say what it was not: not scandalous, not punishable, not rebellious. It was, like the attraction that had led him to marry her, Pahad’s widow with five children, something he could not see clearly.

When the Special Branch knocked steadily on the door in the small hours of Tuesday morning he did not wake up, for his return to consciousness was always set in his mind to half past four, and that was more than an hour away. Mrs Bamjee got up herself, struggled into Jimmy’s raincoat, which was hanging over a chair, and went to the front door. The clock on the wall — a wedding present when she married Pahad — showed three o’clock when she snapped on the light, and she knew at once who it was on the other side of the door. Although she was not surprised, her hands shook like a very old person’s as she undid the locks and the complicated catch on the wire burglar-proofing. And then she opened the door and they were there — two coloured policemen in plain clothes. ‘Zanip Bamjee?’

‘Yes.’

As they talked, Bamjee woke up in the sudden terror of having overslept. Then he became conscious of men’s voices. He heaved himself out of bed in the dark and went to the window, which, like the front door, was covered with a heavy mesh of thick wire against intruders from the dingy lane it looked upon. Bewildered, he appeared in the dining room, where the policemen were searching through a soapbox of papers beside the duplicating machine.

‘Yusuf, it’s for me,’ Mrs Bamjee said.

At once, the snap of a trap, realisation came. He stood there in an old shirt before the two policemen, and the woman was going off to prison because of the natives. ‘There you are!’ he shouted, standing away from her. ‘That’s what you’ve got for it. Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I? That’s the end of it now. That’s the finish. That’s what it’s come to.’

She listened with her head at the slightest tilt to one side, as if to ward off a blow, or in compassion.

Jimmy, Pahad’s son, appeared at the door with a suitcase; two or three of the girls were behind him. ‘Here, Ma, you take my green jersey.’ ‘I’ve found your clean blouse.’ Bamjee had to keep moving out of their way as they helped their mother to make ready. It was like the preparation for one of the family festivals his wife made such a fuss over; wherever he put himself they bumped into him. Even the two policemen mumbled ‘Excuse me,’ and pushed past into the rest of the house to continue their search. They took with them a tome that Nehru had written in prison; it had been bought from a persevering travelling salesman and kept, for years, on the mantelpiece. ‘Oh, don’t take that, please,’ Mrs Bamjee said suddenly, clinging to the arm of the man who had picked it up.

The man held it away from her.

‘What does it matter, Ma?’

It was true that no one in the house had ever read it; but she said, ‘It’s for my children.’

‘Ma, leave it.’ Jimmy, who was squat and plump, looked like a merchant advising a client against a roll of silk she had set her heart on. She went into the bedroom and got dressed. When she came out in her old yellow sari with a brown coat over it, the faces of the children were behind her like faces on the platform at a railway station. They kissed her goodbye. The policemen did not hurry her, but she seemed to be in a hurry just the same.

‘What am I going to do?’ Bamjee accused them all.

The policemen looked away patiently.

‘It’ll be all right. Girlie will help. The big children can manage. And, Yusuf—’ The children crowded in around her; two of the younger ones had awakened and appeared, asking shrill questions.

‘Come on,’ said the policemen.

‘I want to speak to my husband.’ She broke away and came back to him, and the movement of her sari hid them from the rest of the room for a moment. His face hardened in suspicious anticipation against the request to give some message to the next fool who would take up her pamphleteering until he, too, was arrested. ‘On Sunday,’ she said. ‘Take them on Sunday.’ He did not know what she was talking about. ‘The engagement party,’ she whispered, low and urgent. ‘They shouldn’t miss it. Ismail will be offended.’

They listened to the car drive away. Jimmy bolted and barred the front door, and then at once opened it again; he put on the raincoat that his mother had taken off. ‘Going to tell Girlie,’ he said.

The children went back to bed. Their father did not say a word to any of them; their talk, the crying of the younger ones and the argumentative voices of the older, went on in the bedrooms. He found himself alone; he felt the night all around him. And then he happened to meet the clock face and saw with a terrible sense of unfamiliarity that this was not the secret night but an hour he should have recognised: the time he always got up. He pulled on his trousers and his dirty white hawker’s coat and wound his grey muffler up to the stubble on his chin and went to work.

The duplicating machine was gone from the sideboard. The policemen had taken it with them, along with the pamphlets and the conference reports and the stack of old newspapers that had collected on top of the wardrobe in the bedroom — not the thick dailies of the white men, but the thin, impermanent-looking papers that spoke up, sometimes interrupted by suppression or lack of money, for the rest. It was all gone. When he had married her and moved in with her and her five children, into what had been the Pahad and became the Bamjee house, he had not recognised the humble, harmless, and apparently useless routine tasks — the minutes of meetings being written up on the dining-room table at night, the government blue books that were read while the latest baby was suckled, the employment of the fingers of the older children in the fashioning of crinkle-paper Congress rosettes — as activity intended to move mountains. For years and years he had not noticed it, and now it was gone.