Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

In the evening Josias managed to make some excuse to come out with me alone for a bit. He said, ‘I told them you were a hundred per cent. It’s just the same as if I know.’

‘Of course, no difference. I just haven’t had much of a chance to do anything. .’ I didn’t carry on: ‘. . because I was too young’; we didn’t want to bring Emma into it. And anyway, no one but a real kid is too young any more. Look at the boys who are up for sabotage.

I said, ‘Have they got them all?’

He hunched his shoulders.

‘I mean, even the ones for the picks and spades. .?’

He wouldn’t say anything, but I knew I could ask. ‘Oh, boetie , man, even just to keep a look out, there on the road. .’

I know he didn’t want it but once they knew I knew, and that I’d been there and everything, they were keen to use me. At least that’s what I think. I never went to any meetings or anything where it was planned, and beforehand I only met the two others who were with me at the turn-off in the end, and we were told exactly what we had to do by Seb Masinde. Of course, neither of us said a word to Emma. The Monday that we did it was three weeks later and I can tell you, although a lot’s happened to me since then, I’ll never forget the moment when we flagged the truck through with Josias sitting there on the back in his little seat. Josias! I wanted to laugh and shout there in the veld; I didn’t feel scared — what was there to be scared of, he’d been sitting on a load of dynamite every day of his life for years now, so what’s the odds. We had one of those tins of fire and a bucket of tar and the real ‘Road Closed’ signs from the PWD and everything went smooth at our end. It was at the Nek Halt end that the trouble started when one of these AA patrol bikes had to come along (Josias says it was something new, they’d never met a patrol on that road that time of day, before) and get suspicious about the block there. In the meantime the truck was stopped all right but someone was shot and Josias tried to get the gun from the white man up in front of the truck and there was a hell of a fight and they had to make a get-away with the stuff in a car and van back through our block, instead of taking over the truck and driving it to a hiding place to offload. More than half the stuff had to be left behind in the truck. Still, they got clean away with what they did get and it was never found by the police. Whenever I read in the papers here that something’s been blown up back at home, I wonder if it’s still one of our bangs. Two of our people got picked up right away and some more later and the whole thing was all over the papers with speeches by the Chief of Special Branch about a master plot and everything. But Josias got away OK. We three chaps at the roadblock just ran into the veld to where there were bikes hidden. We went to a place we’d been told in Rustenburg district for a week and then we were told to get over to Bechuanaland. It wasn’t so bad; we had no money but around Rustenburg it was easy to pinch paw-paws and oranges off the farms. . Oh, I sent a message to Emma that I was all right; and at that time it didn’t seem true that I couldn’t go home again.

But in Bechuanaland it was different. We had no money, and you don’t find food on trees in that dry place. They said they would send us money; it didn’t come. But Josias was there too, and we stuck together; people hid us and we kept going. Planes arrived and took away the big shots and the white refugees but although we were told we’d go too, it never came off. We had no money to pay for ourselves. There were plenty others like us, in the beginning. At last we just walked, right up Bechuanaland and through Northern Rhodesia to Mbeya, that’s over the border in Tanganyika, where we were headed for. A long walk; took Josias and me months. We met up with a chap who’d been given a bit of money and from there sometimes we went by bus. No one asks questions when you’re nobody special and you walk, like all the other African people themselves, or take the buses that the whites never use; it’s only if you’ve got the money for cars or to arrive in an aeroplane that all these things happen that you read about: getting sent back over the border, refused permits and so on. So we got here, to Tanganyika at last, down to this town of Dar es Salaam where we’d been told we’d be going.

There’s a refugee camp here and they give you a shilling or two a day until you get work. But it’s out of town, for one thing, and we soon left there and found a room down in the native town. There are some nice buildings, of course, in the real town — nothing like Johannesburg or Durban, though — and that used to be the white town, the whites who are left still live there, but the Africans with big jobs in the government and so on live there too. Some of our leaders who are refugees like us live in these houses and have big cars; everyone knows they’re important men, here, not like at home when if you’re black you’re just rubbish for the locations. The people down where we lived are very poor and it’s hard to get work because they haven’t got enough work for themselves, but I’ve got my standard seven and I managed to get a small job as a clerk. Josias never found steady work. But that didn’t matter so much because the big thing was that Emma was able to come to join us after five months, and she and I earn the money. She’s a nurse, you see, and Africanisation started in the hospitals and the government was short of nurses. So Emma got the chance to come up with a party of them sent for specially from South Africa and Rhodesia. We were very lucky because it’s impossible for people to get their families up here. She came in a plane paid for by the government, and she and the other girls had their photograph taken for the newspaper as they got off at the airport. That day she came we took her to the beach, where everyone can bathe, no restrictions, and for a cool drink in one of the hotels (she’d never been in a hotel before), and we walked up and down the road along the bay where everyone walks and where you can see the ships coming in and going out so near that the men out there wave to you. Whenever we bumped into anyone else from home they would stop and ask her about home, and how everything was. Josias and I couldn’t stop grinning to hear us all, in the middle of Dar, talking away in our language about the things we know. That day it was like it had happened already: the time when we are home again and everything is our way.

Well, that’s nearly three years ago, since Emma came. Josias has been sent away now and there’s only Emma and me. That was always the idea, to send us away for training. Some go to Ethiopia and some go to Algeria and all over the show and by the time they come back there won’t be anything Verwoerd’s men know in the way of handling guns and so on that they won’t know better. That’s for a start. I’m supposed to go too, but some of us have been waiting a long time. In the meantime I go to work and I walk about this place in the evenings and I buy myself a glass of beer in a bar when I’ve got money. Emma and I have still got the flat we had before Josias left and two nurses from the hospital pay us for the other bedroom. Emma still works at the hospital but I don’t know how much longer. Most days now since Josias’s gone she wants me to walk up to fetch her from the hospital when she comes off duty, and when I get under the trees on the drive I see her staring out looking for me as if I’ll never turn up ever again. Every day it’s like that. When I come up she smiles and looks like she used to for a minute but by the time we’re ten yards on the road she’s shaking and shaking her head until the tears come and saying over and over, ‘A person can’t stand it, a person can’t stand it.’ She said right from the beginning that the hospitals here are not like the hospitals at home, where the nurses have to know their job. She’s got a whole ward in her charge and now she says they’re worse and worse and she can’t trust anyone to do anything for her. And the staff don’t like having strangers working with them anyway. She tells me every day like she’s telling me for the first time. Of course it’s true that some of the people don’t like us being here. You know how it is, people haven’t got enough jobs to go round, themselves. But I don’t take much notice; I’ll be sent off one of these days and until then I’ve got to eat and that’s that.