Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

Franz. . When you received copies of your book ‘In The Penal Colony’ from Kurt Wolff Verlag that time. . You gave me one and I said ‘Put it on the night-table.’ You say I never mentioned it again. Well, don’t you understand — I’m not a literary man. I’m telling you now. I read a little bit, a page or two at a time. If you had seen that book, there was a pencil mark every two, three pages, so I would know next time where I left off. It wasn’t like the books I knew — I hadn’t much time for reading, working like a slave since I was a small boy, I wasn’t like you, I couldn’t shut myself up in a room with books, when I was young. I would have starved. But you know that. Can’t you understand that I was — yes — not too proud — ashamed to let you know I didn’t find it easy to understand your kind of writing, it was all strange to me.

Hah! I know I’m no intellectual, but I knew how to live!

Just a moment. . give me time. . there’s a fading. . Yes — can you imagine how we felt when Ottla told us you had tuberculosis? Oh how could you bring it over your heart to remind me I once said, in a temper, to a useless assistant coughing all over the shop (you should have had to deal with those lazy goyim ), he ought to die, the sick dog. Did I know you would get tuberculosis, too? It wasn’t our fault your lungs rotted. I tried to expand your chest when you were little, teaching you to swim; you should never have moved out of your own home, the care of your parents, to that rat-hole in the Schönbornpalais. And the hovel in Berlin. . We had some good times, didn’t we? Franz? When we had beer and sausages after the swimming lessons? At least you remembered the beer and sausages, when you were dying.

One more thing. It chokes me, I have to say it. I know you’ll never answer. You once wrote ‘Speech is possible only where one wants to lie.’ You were too ultra-sensitive to speak to us, Franz. You kept silence, with the truth: those playing a game of cards, turning in bed on the other side of the wall — it was the sound of live people you didn’t like. Your revenge, that you were too cowardly to take in life, you’ve taken here. We can’t lie peacefully in our graves; dug up, unwrapped from our shrouds by your fame. To desecrate your parents’ grave as well as their bed, aren’t you ashamed? Aren’t you ashamed — now? Well, what’s the use of quarrelling. We lie together in the same grave — you, your mother and I. We’ve ended up as we always should have been, united. Rest in peace, my son. I wish you had let me.

Your father,

Hermann Kafka

Stanley Dobrow, using the Canonball Sureshot, one of three cameras he was given for his barmitzvah, photographed it. He did. I promise you , he said — as children adjure integrity by pledging to the future something that has already happened. His friends Hilton and Sharon also saw it: Stanley jacked himself from the pool, ran through the house leaving wet footprints all the way up the new stair carpet, and fetched the Canonball Sureshot.

The thrashing together of two tree tops — that was all that came out.

When other people claimed to have seen it — or another one like it: there were reports from other suburbs, quite far away — and someone’s beautiful Persian tabby and someone else’s fourteen-year-old dachshund were found mauled and dead, Stanley’s father believed him and phoned a newspaper to report his son’s witness. Predator At Large In Plush Suburbs was the headline tried out by a university graduate newly hired as a sub-editor; the chief sub thought ‘predator’ an upstage word for a mass-circulation Sunday paper and substituted ‘wild animal’, adding a question mark at the end of the line. The report claimed a thirteen-year-old schoolboy had been the first to see the creature, and had attempted to photograph it. Stanley’s name, which had lost a syllable when his great-grandfather Leib Dobrowsky landed from Lithuania in 1920, was misspelt as ‘Dobrov’. His mother carefully corrected this in the cuttings she sent to her mother-in-law, a cousin abroad, and to the collateral family who had given the camera. People telephoned: I believe your Stan was in the paper! What was it he saw?

A vet said the teeth-marks on the dead pets, Mrs Sheena McLeod’s ‘Natasha’ and the Bezuidenhout family’s beloved ‘Fritzie’, were consistent with the type of bite given by a wild cat. Less than a hundred years ago, viverra civetta must have been a common species in the koppies around the city; nature sometimes came back, forgot time and survived eight-lane freeways, returning to ancestral haunts. He recalled the suicidal swim of two elephants who struck out making for ancient mating grounds across Lake Kariba, beneath which 5,000 square kilometres of their old ruminants’ pathways were drowned in a man-made sea. A former pet-shop owner wrote to Readers’ Views with the opinion that the animal almost certainly was a vervet monkey, an escaped pet. Those who had seen it insisted it was a larger species, though most likely of the ape family. Stanley Dobrow and his two friends described the face reflected between trees, beside them on the surface of the swimming pool: dark face with ‘far-back’ eyes — whether what broke the image was Stanley’s scramble from the water or the advance of the caterpillar device that crawled about the pool sucking up dirt, they never agreed.

Whatever it was, it made a nice change from the usual sort of news, these days. Nothing but strikes, exchanges of insults between factions of what used to be a power to be relied upon, disputes over boundaries that had been supposed to divide peace and prosperity between all, rioting students, farmers dissatisfied with low prices, consumers paying more for bread and mealie meal, more insults — these coming in the form of boycotts and censures from abroad, beyond the fished-out territorial waters. It was said the local fishing industry was ruined by poaching Russians (same old bad news).

Now this event that was causing excitement over in the Johannesburg suburbs: that was the kind of item there used to be — before the papers started calling blacks ‘Mr’ and publishing the terrible things communists taught them to say about the white man. Those good old stories of giant pumpkins and — Mrs Naas Klopper remembered it so well — when she was a little child, that lion that lived with a little fox terrier in its cage at the Jo’burg zoo; this monkey or whatever it was gave you something to wonder about again, talk about; it had something to do with your own life, it could happen to you (imagine! what a scare, to see a thing like that, some creature jumping out in your own yard), not like all that other stuff, that happened somewhere else, somewhere you’d never seen and never would, the United Nations there in New York, or the blacks’ places — Soweto.

Mrs Naas Klopper (she always called herself, although her name was Hester) read in Die Transvaaler about the creature in the Johannesburg suburbs while waiting for the rice to boil in time for lunch. She sat in the split-level lounge of what she was always quietly aware of as her ‘lovely home’ Naas had built according to her artistic ideas when first he began to make money out of his agency for the sale of farmland and agricultural plots, fifteen years ago. Set on several acres outside a satellite country town where Klopper’s Eiendoms Beperk flourished, the house had all the features of prosperous suburban houses in Johannesburg or Pretoria. The rice was boiling in an all-electric kitchen with eye-level microwave oven and cabinet deep-freezer. The bedrooms were en suite, with pot plants in the respectively pink and green bathrooms. The living room in which she sat on a nylon-velvet covered sofa had pastel plastic Venetian blinds as well as net curtains and matching nylon velvet drapes, and the twelve chairs in the dining area were covered with needlepoint worked in a design of shepherdesses and courtiers by Mrs Naas Klopper herself; the dried-flower-and-shell pictures were also her work, she had crocheted the tasselled slings by which plants were suspended above the cane furniture on the glassed sunporch, and it was on a trip to the Victoria Falls, when Rhodesia was still Rhodesia, that she had bought the hammered copper plaques. The TV set was behind a carved console door. Stools set around the mini bar again bore the original touch — they were covered not exactly with modish zebra skin, but with the skins of impala which Naas himself had shot. Outside, there was a palette-shaped swimming pool like the one in which Stanley and friends, forty kilometres away in Johannesburg, had seen the face.