Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

I, of course, am there only in the evenings and on weekends. I am a partner in a luxury travel agency, which is flourishing — needs to be, as I tell Lerice, in order to carry the farm. Still, though I know we can’t afford it, and though the sweetish smell of the fowls Lerice breeds sickens me, so that I avoid going past their runs, the farm is beautiful in a way I had almost forgotten — especially on a Sunday morning when I get up and go out into the paddock and see not the palm trees and fishpond and imitation-stone bird bath of the suburbs but white ducks on the dam, the lucerne field brilliant as window dresser’s grass, and the little, stocky, mean-eyed bull, lustful but bored, having his face tenderly licked by one of his ladies. Lerice comes out with her hair uncombed, in her hand a stick dripping with cattle dip. She will stand and look dreamily for a moment, the way she would pretend to look sometimes in those plays.

‘They’ll mate tomorrow,’ she will say. ‘This is their second day. Look how she loves him, my little Napoleon.’

So that when people come out to see us on Sunday afternoon, I am likely to hear myself saying as I pour out the drinks, ‘When I drive back home from the city every day, past those rows of suburban houses, I wonder how the devil we ever did stand it. . Would you care to look around?’

And there I am, taking some pretty girl and her young husband stumbling down to our river bank, the girl catching her stockings on the mealie-stooks and stepping over cow turds humming with jewel-green flies while she says, ‘. . the tensions of the damned city. And you’re near enough to get into town to a show, too! I think it’s wonderful. Why, you’ve got it both ways!’

And for a moment I accept the triumph as if I had managed it — the impossibility that I’ve been trying for all my life — just as if the truth was that you could get it ‘both ways’, instead of finding yourself with not even one way or the other but a third, one you had not provided for at all.

But even in our saner moments, when I find Lerice’s earthy enthusiasms just as irritating as I once found her histrionical ones, and she finds what she calls my ‘jealousy’ of her capacity for enthusiasm as big a proof of my inadequacy for her as a mate as ever it was, we do believe that we have at least honestly escaped those tensions peculiar to the city about which our visitors speak. When Johannesburg people speak of ‘tension’, they don’t mean hurrying people in crowded streets, the struggle for money, or the general competitive character of city life. They mean the guns under the white men’s pillows and the burglar bars on the white men’s windows. They mean those strange moments on city pavements when a black man won’t stand aside for a white man.

Out in the country, even ten miles out, life is better than that. In the country, there is a lingering remnant of the pre-transitional stage; our relationship with the blacks is almost feudal. Wrong, I suppose, obsolete, but more comfortable all around. We have no burglar bars, no gun. Lerice’s farm boys have their wives and their piccanins living with them on the land. They brew their sour beer without the fear of police raids. In fact, we’ve always rather prided ourselves that the poor devils have nothing much to fear, being with us; Lerice even keeps an eye on their children, with all the competence of a woman who has never had a child of her own, and she certainly doctors them all — children and adults — like babies whenever they happen to be sick.

It was because of this that we were not particularly startled one night last winter when the boy Albert came knocking at our window long after we had gone to bed. I wasn’t in our bed but sleeping in the little dressing-room- cum -linen-room next door, because Lerice had annoyed me and I didn’t want to find myself softening towards her simply because of the sweet smell of the talcum powder on her flesh after her bath. She came and woke me up. ‘Albert says one of the boys is very sick,’ she said. ‘I think you’d better go down and see. He wouldn’t get us up at this hour for nothing.’

‘What time is it?’

‘What does it matter?’ Lerice is maddeningly logical.

I got up awkwardly as she watched me — how is it I always feel a fool when I have deserted her bed? After all, I know from the way she never looks at me when she talks to me at breakfast the next day that she is hurt and humiliated at my not wanting her — and I went out, clumsy with sleep.

‘Which of the boys is it?’ I asked Albert as we followed the dance of my torch.

‘He’s too sick. Very sick, baas,’ he said.

‘But who? Franz?’ I remembered Franz had had a bad cough for the past week.

Albert did not answer; he had given me the path, and was walking along beside me in the tall dead grass. When the light of the torch caught his face, I saw that he looked acutely embarrassed. ‘What’s this all about?’ I said.

He lowered his head under the glance of the light. ‘It’s not me, baas. I don’t know. Petrus he send me.’

Irritated, I hurried him along to the huts. And there, on Petrus’s iron bedstead, with its brick stilts, was a young man, dead. On his forehead there was still a light, cold sweat; his body was warm. The boys stood around as they do in the kitchen when it is discovered that someone has broken a dish — uncooperative, silent. Somebody’s wife hung about in the shadows, her hands wrung together under her apron.

I had not seen a dead man since the war. This was very different. I felt like the others — extraneous, useless. ‘What was the matter?’ I asked.

The woman patted at her chest and shook her head to indicate the painful impossibility of breathing.

He must have died of pneumonia.

I turned to Petrus. ‘Who was this boy? What was he doing here?’ The light of a candle on the floor showed that Petrus was weeping. He followed me out the door.

When we were outside, in the dark, I waited for him to speak. But he didn’t. ‘Now, come on, Petrus, you must tell me who this boy was. Was he a friend of yours?’

‘He’s my brother, baas. He came from Rhodesia to look for work.’

The story startled Lerice and me a little. The young boy had walked down from Rhodesia to look for work in Johannesburg, had caught a chill from sleeping out along the way, and had lain ill in his brother Petrus’s hut since his arrival three days before. Our boys had been frightened to ask us for help for him because we had never been intended ever to know of his presence. Rhodesian natives are barred from entering the Union unless they have a permit; the young man was an illegal immigrant. No doubt our boys had managed the whole thing successfully several times before; a number of relatives must have walked the seven or eight hundred miles from poverty to the paradise of zoot suits, police raids and black slum townships that is their Egoli, City of Gold — the Bantu name for Johannesburg. It was merely a matter of getting such a man to lie low on our farm until a job could be found with someone who would be glad to take the risk of prosecution for employing an illegal immigrant in exchange for the services of someone as yet untainted by the city.

Well, this was one who would never get up again.

‘You would think they would have felt they could tell us ,’ said Lerice next morning. ‘Once the man was ill. You would have thought at least—’ When she is getting intense over something, she has a way of standing in the middle of a room as people do when they are shortly to leave on a journey, looking searchingly about her at the most familiar objects as if she had never seen them before. I had noticed that in Petrus’s presence in the kitchen, earlier, she had had the air of being almost offended with him, almost hurt.