Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

The flat is nice with a real bathroom and we are paying off the table and six chairs she liked so much, but when we walk in, her face is terrible. She keeps saying the place will never be straight. At home there was only a tap in the yard for all the houses but she never said it there. She doesn’t sit down for more than a minute without getting up at once again, but you can’t get her to go out, even on these evenings when it’s so hot you can’t breathe. I go down to the market to buy the food now, she says she can’t stand it. When I asked what — because at the beginning she used to like the market, where you can pick a live fowl for yourself, quite cheap — she said those little rotten tomatoes they grow here, and the dirty people all shouting and she can’t understand. She doesn’t sleep, half the time, at night, either, and lately she wakes me up. It happened only last night. She was standing there in the dark and she said: ‘I felt bad.’

I said, ‘I’ll make you some tea,’ though what good could tea do.

‘There must be something the matter with me,’ she says. ‘I must go to the doctor tomorrow.’

‘Is it pains again, or what?’

She shakes her head slowly, over and over, and I know she’s going to cry again. ‘A place where there’s no one. I get up and look out the window and it’s just like I’m not awake. And every day, every day. I can’t ever wake up and be out of it. I always see this town.’

Of course it’s hard for her. I’ve picked up Swahili and I can get around all right; I mean I can always talk to anyone if I feel like it, but she hasn’t learnt more than ahsante — she could’ve picked it up just as easily, but she can’t , if you know what I mean. It’s just a noise to her, like dogs barking or those black crows in the palm trees. When anyone does come here to see her — someone else from home, usually, or perhaps I bring the Rhodesian who works where I do, she only sits there and whatever anyone talks about she doesn’t listen until she can sigh and say, ‘Heavy, heavy. Yes, for a woman alone. No friends, nobody. For a woman alone, I can tell you.’

Last night I said to her, ‘It would be worse if you were at home, you wouldn’t have seen Josias or me for a long time.’

She said, ‘Yes, it would be bad. Sela and everybody. And the old crowd at the hospital. . but just the same, it would be bad. D’you remember how we used to go right into town on my Saturday off? The people — ay! Even when you were twelve you used to be scared you’d lose me.’

‘I wasn’t scared, you were the one was scared to get run over sometimes.’ But in the location when we stole fruit and sweets from the shops, Emma could always grab me out of the way of trouble, Emma always saves me. The same Emma. And yet it’s not the same. And what could I do for her?

I suppose she wants to be back there now. But still she wouldn’t be the same. I don’t often get the feeling she knows what I’m thinking about, any more, or that I know what she’s thinking, but she said, ‘You and he go off, you come back or perhaps you don’t come back, you know what you must do. But for a woman? What shall I do there in my life? What shall I do here? What time is this for a woman?’

It’s hard for her. Emma. She’ll say all that often now, I know. She tells me everything so many times. Well, I don’t mind it when I fetch her from the hospital and I don’t mind going to the market. But straight after we’ve eaten, now, in the evenings, I let her go through it once and then I’m off. To walk in the streets when it gets a bit cooler in the dark. I don’t know why it is but I’m thinking so bloody hard about getting out there in the streets that I push down my food as fast as I can without her noticing. I’m so keen to get going I feel queer, kind of tight and excited. Just until I can get out and not hear. I wouldn’t even mind skipping the meal. In the streets in the evening everyone is out. On the grass along the bay the fat Indians in their white suits with their wives in those fancy coloured clothes. Men and their girls holding hands. Old watchmen like beggars, sleeping in the doorways of the shut shops. Up and down people walk, walk, just sliding one foot after the other because now and then, like somebody lifting a blanket, there’s air from the sea. She should come out for a bit of air in the evening, man. It’s an old, old place this, they say. Not the buildings, I mean; but the place. They say ships were coming here before even a place like London was a town. She thought the bay was so nice, that first day. The lights from the ships run all over the water and the palms show up a long time even after it gets dark. There’s a smell I’ve smelled ever since we’ve been here — three years! I don’t mean the smells in the native town; a special warm night smell. You can even smell it at three in the morning. I’ve smelled it when I was standing about with Emma, by the window; it’s as hot in the middle of the night here as it is in the middle of the day at home — funny, when you look at the stars and the dark. Well, I’ll be going off soon. It can’t be long now. Now that Josias is gone. You’ve just got to wait your time; they haven’t forgotten about you. Dar es Salaam. Dar. Sometimes I walk with another chap from home, he says some things, makes you laugh! He says the old watchmen who sleep in the doorways get their wives to come there with them. Well, I haven’t seen it. He says we’re definitely going with the next lot. Dar es Salaam. Dar. One day I suppose I’ll remember it and tell my wife I stayed three years there, once. I walk and walk, along the bay, past the shops and hotels and the German church and the big bank, and through the mud streets between old shacks and stalls. It’s dark there and full of other walking shapes as I go past light coming from the cracks in the walls, where the people are in their homes.

The hotel stood a hundred yards up from the bank of the river. On the lintel above the screen door at the entrance, small gilt letters read: J. P. CUNNINGHAM, LICENSED TO SELL MALT, WINE AND SPIRITUOUS LIQUORS; the initials had been painted in over others that had been painted out. Sitting in the office off the veranda, at the old, high, pigeonhole desk stuffed with papers, with the cardboard files stacked round her in record of twenty years, she turned her head now and then to the water. She did not see it, the sheeny, gnat-hazy surface of the tropical river; she rested her eyes a moment. And then she turned back to her invoices and accounts, or wrote out, in her large, strong hand, the lunch and dinner menus: Potage of Green Peas, Crumbed Chop and Sauter Potatoes — the language, to her an actual language, of hotel cooking, that was in fact the garbled remnant influence of the immigrant chef from Europe who had once stuck it out in the primitive kitchen for three months, on his way south to the scope and plush of a Johannesburg restaurant.

She spent most of the day in the office, all year. The only difference was that in winter she was comfortable, it was even cool enough for her to need to wear a cardigan, and in summer she had to sit with her legs spread under her skirt while the steady trickle of sweat crept down the inner sides of her thighs and collected behind her knees. When people came through the squealing screen door on to the hotel veranda, and hung about in the unmistakable way of new arrivals (this only happened in winter, of course; nobody came to that part of Central Africa in the summer, unless they were obliged to) she would sense rather than hear them, and she would make them wait a few minutes. Then she would get up from the desk slowly, grinding back her chair, pulling her dress down with one hand, and appear. She had never learnt the obsequious yet superior manner of a hotelkeeper’s wife — the truth was that she was shy, and, being a heavy forty-year-old woman, she expressed this in lame brusqueness. Once the new guests had signed the register, she was quite likely to go back to her bookkeeping without having shown them to their rooms or called a boy to carry their luggage. If they ventured to disturb her again in her office, she would say, astonished, ‘Hasn’t someone fixed you up? My husband, or the housekeeper? Oh Lord—’ And she would go through the dingy company of the grass chairs in the lounge, and through the ping-pong room that smelled strongly of red floor polish and cockroach repellent, to find help.