Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

We lived in one room with our grandmother but it was a tin house with a number and later on there was a street light at the corner. These houses I was coming to had a pattern all over them marked into the mud they were built of. There was a mound of dried cows’ business, as tall as I was, stacked up in a pattern, too. And then the usual junk our people have, just like in the location: old tins, broken things collected in white people’s rubbish heaps. The fowls ran sideways from my feet and two old men let their talking die away into a-has and e-hes as I came up. I greeted them the right way to greet old men and they nodded and went on e-he-ing and a-ha-ing to show that they had been greeted properly. One of them had very clean ragged trousers tied with string and sat on the ground, but the other, sitting on a bucket seat that must have been taken from some scrapyard car, was dressed in a way I’ve never seen — from the old days, I suppose. He wore a black suit with very wide trousers, laced boots, a stiff white collar and black tie and, on top of it all, a broken old hat. It was Sunday, of course, so I suppose he was all dressed up. I’ve heard that these people who work for farmers wear sacks most of the time. The old ones didn’t ask me what I wanted there. They just peered at me with their eyes gone the colour of soapy water because they were so old. And I didn’t know what to say because I hadn’t thought what I was going to say, I’d just walked. Then a little kid slipped out of the dark doorway quick as a cockroach. I thought perhaps everyone else was out because it was Sunday but then a voice called from inside the other house, and when the child didn’t answer, called again, and a woman came to the doorway.

I said my bicycle had a puncture and could I have some water.

She said something into the house and in a minute a girl, about fifteen she must’ve been, edged past her carrying a paraffin tin and went off to fetch water. Like all the girls that age, she never looked at you. Her body shook under an ugly old dress and she almost hobbled in her hurry to get away. Her head was tied up in a rag-doek right down to the eyes the way old-fashioned people do, otherwise she would have been quite pretty, like any other girl. When she had gone a little way the kid went pumping after her, panting, yelling, opening his skinny legs wide as scissors over stones and antheaps, and then he caught up with her and you could see that right away she was quite different, I knew how it was, she yelled at him, you heard her laugh as she chased him with the tin, whirled around from out of his clutching hands, struggled with him; they were together like Emma and I used to be when we got away from the old lady, and from the school, and everybody. And Emma was also one of our girls who have the big strong comfortable bodies of mothers even when they’re still kids, maybe it comes from always lugging the smaller one round on their backs.

A man came out of the house behind the woman and was friendly. His hair had the dusty look of someone who’s been sleeping off drink. In fact, he was still a bit heavy with it.

‘You coming from Jo’burg?’

But I wasn’t going to be caught out being careless at all, Josias could count on me for that.

‘Vereeniging.’

He thought there was something funny there — nobody dresses like a Jo’burger, you could always spot us a mile off — but he was too full to follow it up.

He stood stretching his sticky eyelids open and then he fastened on me the way some people will do. ‘Can’t you get me work there where you are?’

‘What kind of work?’

He waved a hand describing me. ‘You got a good work.’

‘S’all right.’

‘Where you working now?’

‘Garden boy.’

He tittered, ‘Look like you work in town,’ shook his head.

I was surprised to find the woman handing me a tin of beer, and I squatted on the ground to drink it. It’s mad to say that a mud house can be pretty, but those patterns made in the mud looked nice. It must have been done with a sharp stone or stick when the mud was smooth and wet, the shapes of things like big leaves and moons filled in with lines that went all one way in this shape, another way in that, so that as you looked at the walls in the sun some shapes were dark and some were light, and if you moved the light ones went dark and the dark ones got light instead. The girl came back with the heavy tin of water on her head making her neck thick. I washed out the jam tin I’d had the beer in and filled it with water. When I thanked them, the old men stirred and a-ha-ed and e-he-ed again.

The man made as if to walk a bit with me, but I was lucky, he didn’t go more than a few yards. ‘No good,’ he said. ‘Every morning, five o’clock, and the pay. . very small.’

How I would have hated to be him, a man already married and with big children, working all his life in the fields wearing sacks. When you think like this about someone he seems something you could never possibly be, as if it’s his fault, and not just the chance of where he happened to be born. At the same time I had a crazy feeling I wanted to tell him something wonderful, something he’d never dreamt could happen, something he’d fall on his knees and thank me for. I wanted to say, ‘Soon you’ll be the farmer yourself and you’ll have shoes like me and your girl will get water from your windmill. Because on Monday, or another Monday, the truck will stop down there and all the stuff will be taken away and they — Josias, me; even you, yes — we’ll win for ever.’ But instead all I said was, ‘Who did that on your house?’ He didn’t understand and I made a drawing in the air with my hand.

‘The women,’ he said, not interested.

Down in the donga I sat a while and then threw away the tin and rode off without looking up again to where the kraal was.

It wasn’t that Monday. Emma and Josias go to bed very early and of course they were asleep by the time I got home late on Sunday night — Emma thought I’d been with the boys I used to go around with at weekends. But Josias got up at half past four every morning, then, because it was a long way from the location to where the dynamite factory was, and although I didn’t usually even hear him making the fire in the kitchen which was also where I was sleeping, that morning I was awake the moment he got out of bed next door. When he came into the kitchen I was sitting up in my blankets and I whispered loudly — ‘I went there yesterday. I saw the turn-off and everything. Down there by the donga, ay? Is that the place?’

He looked at me, a bit dazed. He nodded. Then, ‘Wha’d’you mean you went there?’

‘I could see that’s the only good place. I went up to the houses, too, just to see. . the people are all right. Not many. When it’s not Sunday there may be nobody there but the old man — there were two, I think one was just a visitor. The man and the woman will be over in the fields somewhere, and that must be quite far, because you can’t see the mealies from the road. .’ I could feel myself being listened to carefully, getting in with him (and if with him, with them ) while I was talking, and I knew exactly what I was saying, absolutely clearly, just as I would know exactly what I was doing.

He began to question me; but like I was an older man or a clever one; he didn’t know what to say. He drank his tea while I told him all about it. He was thinking. Just before he left he said, ‘I shouldn’t’ve told you.’

I ran after him, outside, into the yard. It was still dark. I blurted in the same whisper we’d been using, ‘Not today, is it?’ I couldn’t see his face properly but I knew he didn’t know whether to answer or not.

‘Not today.’ I was so happy I couldn’t go to sleep again.