Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

In any case, I really haven’t the time or inclination any more to go into everything in our life that I know Lerice, from those alarmed and pressing eyes of hers, would like us to go into. She is the kind of woman who doesn’t mind if she looks plain, or odd; I don’t suppose she would even care if she knew how strange she looks when her whole face is out of proportion with urgent uncertainty. I said, ‘Now I’m the one who’ll have to do all the dirty work, I suppose.’

She was still staring at me, trying me out with those eyes — wasting her time, if she only knew.

‘I’ll have to notify the health authorities,’ I said calmly. ‘They can’t just cart him off and bury him. After all, we don’t really know what he died of.’

She simply stood there, as if she had given up — simply ceased to see me at all.

I don’t know when I’ve been so irritated. ‘It might have been something contagious,’ I said. ‘God knows.’ There was no answer.

I am not enamoured of holding conversations with myself. I went out to shout to one of the boys to open the garage and get the car ready for my morning drive to town.

As I had expected, it turned out to be quite a business. I had to notify the police as well as the health authorities, and answer a lot of tedious questions: how was it I was ignorant of the boy’s presence? If I did not supervise my native quarters, how did I know that that sort of thing didn’t go on all the time? Etcetera, etcetera. And when I flared up and told them that so long as my natives did their work, I didn’t think it my right or concern to poke my nose into their private lives, I got from the coarse, dull-witted police sergeant one of those looks that come not from any thinking process going on in the brain but from that faculty common to all who are possessed by the master-race theory — a look of insanely inane certainty. He grinned at me with a mixture of scorn and delight at my stupidity.

Then I had to explain to Petrus why the health authorities had to take away the body for a post-mortem — and, in fact, what a post-mortem was. When I telephoned the health department some days later to find out the result, I was told that the cause of death was, as we had thought, pneumonia, and that the body had been suitably disposed of. I went out to where Petrus was mixing a mash for the fowls and told him that it was all right, there would be no trouble; his brother had died from that pain in his chest. Petrus put down the paraffin tin and said, ‘When can we go to fetch him, baas?’

‘To fetch him?’

‘Will the baas please ask them when we must come?’

I went back inside and called Lerice, all over the house. She came down the stairs from the spare bedrooms, and I said, ‘ Now what am I going to do? When I told Petrus, he just asked calmly when they could go and fetch the body. They think they’re going to bury him themselves.’

‘Well, go back and tell him,’ said Lerice. ‘You must tell him. Why didn’t you tell him then?’

When I found Petrus again, he looked up politely. ‘Look, Petrus,’ I said. ‘You can’t go to fetch your brother. They’ve done it already — they’ve buried him, you understand?’

‘Where?’ he said slowly, dully, as if he thought that perhaps he was getting this wrong.

‘You see, he was a stranger. They knew he wasn’t from here, and they didn’t know he had some of his people here so they thought they must bury him.’ It was difficult to make a pauper’s grave sound like a privilege.

‘Please, baas, the baas must ask them.’ But he did not mean that he wanted to know the burial place. He simply ignored the incomprehensible machinery I told him had set to work on his dead brother; he wanted the brother back.

‘But, Petrus,’ I said, ‘how can I? Your brother is buried already. I can’t ask them now.’

‘Oh, baas!’ he said. He stood with his bran-smeared hands uncurled at his sides, one corner of his mouth twitching.

‘Good God, Petrus, they won’t listen to me! They can’t, anyway. I’m sorry, but I can’t do it. You understand?’

He just kept on looking at me, out of his knowledge that white men have everything, can do anything; if they don’t, it is because they won’t.

And then, at dinner, Lerice started. ‘You could at least phone,’ she said.

‘Christ, what d’you think I am? Am I supposed to bring the dead back to life?’

But I could not exaggerate my way out of this ridiculous responsibility that had been thrust on me. ‘Phone them up,’ she went on. ‘And at least you’ll be able to tell him you’ve done it and they’ve explained that it’s impossible.’

She disappeared somewhere into the kitchen quarters after coffee. A little later she came back to tell me, ‘The old father’s coming down from Rhodesia to be at the funeral. He’s got a permit and he’s already on his way.’

Unfortunately, it was not impossible to get the body back. The authorities said that it was somewhat irregular, but that since the hygiene conditions had been fulfilled, they could not refuse permission for exhumation. I found out that, with the undertaker’s charges, it would cost twenty pounds. Ah, I thought, that settles it. On five pounds a month, Petrus won’t have twenty pounds — and just as well, since it couldn’t do the dead any good. Certainly I should not offer it to him myself. Twenty pounds — or anything else within reason, for that matter — I would have spent without grudging it on doctors or medicines that might have helped the boy when he was alive. Once he was dead, I had no intention of encouraging Petrus to throw away, on a gesture, more than he spent to clothe his whole family in a year.

When I told him, in the kitchen that night, he said, ‘Twenty pounds?’

I said, ‘Yes, that’s right, twenty pounds.’

For a moment, I had the feeling, from the look on his face, that he was calculating. But when he spoke again I thought I must have imagined it. ‘We must pay twenty pounds!’ he said in the faraway voice in which a person speaks of something so unattainable that it does not bear thinking about.

‘All right, Petrus,’ I said, and went back to the living room.

The next morning before I went to town, Petrus asked to see me. ‘Please, baas,’ he said, awkwardly handing me a bundle of notes. They’re so seldom on the giving rather than the receiving side, poor devils, that they don’t really know how to hand money to a white man. There it was, the twenty pounds, in ones and halves, some creased and folded until they were soft as dirty rags, others smooth and fairly new — Franz’s money, I suppose, and Albert’s, and Dora the cook’s, and Jacob the gardener’s, and God knows who else’s besides, from all the farms and smallholdings round about. I took it in irritation more than in astonishment, really — irritation at the waste, the uselessness of this sacrifice by people so poor. Just like the poor everywhere, I thought, who stint themselves the decencies of life in order to insure themselves the decencies of death. So incomprehensible to people like Lerice and me, who regard life as something to be spent extravagantly and, if we think about death at all, regard it as the final bankruptcy.

The servants don’t work on Saturday afternoon anyway, so it was a good day for the funeral. Petrus and his father had borrowed our donkey cart to fetch the coffin from the city, where, Petrus told Lerice on their return, everything was ‘nice’ — the coffin waiting for them, already sealed up to save them from what must have been a rather unpleasant sight after two weeks’ interment. (It had taken all that time for the authorities and the undertaker to make the final arrangements for moving the body.) All morning, the coffin lay in Petrus’s hut, awaiting the trip to the little old burial ground, just outside the eastern boundary of our farm, that was a relic of the days when this was a real farming district rather than a fashionable rural estate. It was pure chance that I happened to be down there near the fence when the procession came past; once again Lerice had forgotten her promise to me and had made the house uninhabitable on a Saturday afternoon. I had come home and been infuriated to find her in a pair of filthy old slacks and with her hair uncombed since the night before, having all the varnish scraped off the living-room floor, if you please. So I had taken my No. 8 iron and gone off to practise my approach shots. In my annoyance, I had forgotten about the funeral, and was reminded only when I saw the procession coming up the path along the outside of the fence towards me; from where I was standing, you can see the graves quite clearly, and that day the sun glinted on bits of broken pottery, a lopsided homemade cross, and jam jars brown with rain water and dead flowers.