Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

‘No, nobody else,’ said his stepdaughter.

She sat herself down at the table, resting her belly. He put his head in his hands. ‘I’m getting old’ — but he was overcome by something much more curious, by an answer. He knew why he had desired her, the ugly widow with five children; he knew what way it was in which she was not like others; it was there, like the fact of the belly that lay between him and her daughter.

My sister’s husband, Josias, used to work on the railways but then he got this job where they make dynamite for the mines. He was the one who sits out on that little iron seat clamped to the back of the big red truck, with a red flag in his hand. The idea is that if you drive up too near the truck or look as if you’re going to crash into it, he waves the flag to warn you off. You’ve seen those trucks often on the Main Reef Road between Johannesburg and the mining towns — they carry the stuff and have DANGER — EXPLOSIVES painted on them. The man sits there, with an iron chain looped across his little seat to keep him from being thrown into the road, and he clutches his flag like a kid with a balloon. That’s how Josias was, too. Of course, if you didn’t take any notice of the warning and went on and crashed into the truck, he would be the first to be blown to high heaven and hell, but he always just sits there, this chap, as if he has no idea when he was born or that he might not die on a bed an old man of eighty. As if the dust in his eyes and the racket of the truck are going to last for ever.

My sister knew she had a good man but she never said anything about being afraid of this job. She only grumbled in winter, when he was stuck out there in the cold and used to get a cough (she’s a nurse), and on those times in summer when it rained all day and she said he would land up with rheumatism, crippled, and then who would give him work? The dynamite people? I don’t think it ever came into her head that any day, every day, he could be blown up instead of coming home in the evening. Anyway, you wouldn’t have thought so by the way she took it when he told us what it was he was going to have to do.

I was working down at a garage in town, that time, at the petrol pumps, and I was eating before he came in because I was on night shift. Emma had the water ready for him and he had a wash without saying much, as usual, but then he didn’t speak when they sat down to eat, either, and when his fingers went into the mealie meal he seemed to forget what it was he was holding and not to be able to shape it into a mouthful. Emma must have thought he felt too dry to eat, because she got up and brought him a jam tin of the beer she had made for Saturday. He drank it and then sat back and looked from her to me, but she said, ‘Why don’t you eat?’ and he began to, slowly. She said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ He got up and yawned and yawned, showing those brown chipped teeth that remind me of the big ape at the Johannesburg zoo that I saw once when I went with the school. He went into the other room of the house, where he and Emma slept, and he came back with his pipe. He filled it carefully, the way a poor man does; I saw, as soon as I went to work at the filling station, how the white men fill their pipes, stuffing the tobacco in, shoving the tin half-shut back into the glovebox of the car.

‘I’m going down to Sela’s place,’ said Emma. ‘I can go with Willie on his way to work if you don’t want to come.’

‘No. Not tonight. You stay here.’ Josias always speaks like this, the short words of a schoolmaster or a boss-boy, but if you hear the way he says them, you know he is not really ordering you around at all, he is only asking you.

‘No, I told her I’m coming,’ Emma said, in the voice of a woman having her own way in a little thing.

‘Tomorrow.’ Josias began to yawn again, looking at us with wet eyes.

‘Go to bed,’ Emma said, ‘I won’t be late.’

‘No, no, I want to. .’ he blew a sigh ‘—when he’s gone, man—’ he moved his pipe at me. ‘I’ll tell you later.’

Emma laughed. ‘What can you tell that Willie can’t hear—’ I’ve lived with them ever since they were married. Emma always was the one who looked after me, even before, when I was a little kid. It was true that whatever happened to us happened to us together. He looked at me; I suppose he saw that I was a man, now: I was in my blue overalls with Shell on the pocket and everything.

He said, ‘. . they want me to do something. . a job with the truck.’

Josias used to turn out regularly to political meetings and he took part in a few protests before everything went underground, but he had never been more than one of the crowd. We had Mandela and the rest of the leaders, cut out of the paper, hanging on the wall, but he had never known, personally, any of them. Of course there were his friends Ndhlovu and Seb Masinde who said they had gone underground and who occasionally came late at night for a meal or slept in my bed for a few hours.

‘They want to stop the truck on the road. .’

‘Stop it?’ Emma was like somebody stepping into cold dark water; with every word that was said she went deeper. ‘But how can you do it — when? Where will they do it?’ She was wild, as if she must go out and prevent it all happening right then.

I felt that cold water of Emma’s rising round the belly because Emma and I often had the same feelings, but I caught also, in Josias’s not looking at me, a signal Emma couldn’t know. Something in me jumped at it like catching a swinging rope. ‘They want the stuff inside. .?’

Nobody said anything.

I said, ‘What a lot of big bangs you could make with that, man,’ and then shut up before Josias needed to tell me to.

‘So what’re you going to do?’ Emma’s mouth stayed open after she had spoken, the lips pulled back.

‘They’ll tell me everything. I just have to give them the best place on the road — that’ll be the Free State road, the others’re too busy. . and. . the time when we pass. .’

‘You’ll be dead.’ Emma’s head was shuddering and her whole body shook; I’ve never seen anybody give up like that. He was dead already, she saw it with her eyes and she was kicking and screaming without knowing how to show it to him. She looked like she wanted to kill Josias herself, for being dead. ‘That’ll be the finish, for sure. He’s got a gun, the white man in front, hasn’t he, you told me. And the one with him? They’ll kill you. You’ll go to prison. They’ll take you to Pretoria gaol and hang you by the rope. . yes, he’s got the gun, you told me, didn’t you. . many times you told me. .’

‘The others’ve got guns too. How d’you think they can hold us up? — they’ve got guns and they’ll come all round him. It’s all worked out—’

‘The one in front will shoot you, I know it, don’t tell me, I know what I say—’ Emma went up and down and around till I thought she would push the walls down — they wouldn’t have needed much pushing, in that house in Tembekile Location — and I was scared of her. I don’t mean for what she would do to me if I got in her way, or to Josias, but for what might happen to her: something like taking a fit or screaming that none of us would be able to forget.

I don’t think Josias was sure about doing the job before but he wanted to do it now. ‘No shooting. Nobody will shoot me. Nobody will know that I know anything. Nobody will know I tell them anything. I’m held up just the same like the others! Same as the white man in front! Who can shoot me? They can shoot me for that?’

‘Someone else can go, I don’t want it, do you hear? You will stay at home, I will say you are sick. . you will be killed, they will shoot you. . Josias, I’m telling you, I don’t want. . I won’t. .’