Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

Since the paper was not a daily, a whole week had to go by before the result of the strange stirring in the fecund mud of association that causes people to write to newspapers about secret preoccupations set off by the subject of an article, could be read by them in print. ‘Only Man Is Vile’ (Rondebosch) wrote that since a coronary attack some years ago he had been advised to keep a pet to lessen cardiac anxiety. His marmoset, a Golden Lion tamarin from South America, had the run of the house ‘including two cats and a Schipperke’ and was like a mother to them. He could only urge other cardiac sufferers to ignore warnings about the dangers of pets. ‘Had Enough’ (Roosevelt Park) invited the ape, baboon, monkey, etc. to come and kill her neighbour’s dog, who barked all night and was responsible for her daughter’s anorexia nervosa. Howard C. Butterfield III had ‘enjoyed your lovely country’ until he and his wife were mugged only ten yards from the Moulin Rouge Hotel in Hillbrow, Johannesburg. He’d like to avail himself of the hospitality of ‘your fine paper’ to tell the black man who slapped his wife before snatching her purse that he had broken her dental bridgework, causing pain and inconvenience on what was to have been the holiday of a lifetime, and that he was no better than any uncivilised ape at large.

Mrs Naas Klopper made a detour on her way to visit her sister Miemie in Pretoria. She had her own car, of course, a ladies’ car Naas provided for her, smaller than his Mercedes, a pretty green Toyota. She hadn’t seen the Kleynhans place for, oh, four or five years — before the old man died. A shock. It was a mess; she felt sorry for that young couple. . really.

She and her sister dressed up for each other, showing off new clothes as they had done when they were girls; the clean soles of her new ankle-strap shoes gritted against the stony drive as she planted the high heels well apart, for balance, and leant into the back of the car to take out her house-warming present.

The girl appeared in the garden, from the backyard. She must have heard the approach of a car.

Mrs Naas Klopper was coming towards her through weeds, insteps arched like proud fists under an intricacy of narrow yellow straps, the bombé of breasts flashing gold chains on blue polka dots that crowded together to form a border at the hem of the dress. The girl’s recognition of the face, seen only once before, was oddly strengthened, like a touched-up photograph, by make-up the original hadn’t been wearing: teeth brightly circled by red lips, blinking blue eyes shuttered with matching lids. Carried before the bosom was a large round biscuit drum flashing tinny colours.

Mrs Naas saw that she’d interrupted the girl in the middle of some dirty task — of course, settling in. The dull hair was broken free of the knot, on one side. Hooked behind an ear, it stuck to the sweaty neck. The breasts (Mrs Naas couldn’t help noticing; why don’t these young girls wear bras these days) were squashed by a shrunken T-shirt and the feet were in split takkies . The only evidence of femininity to which Mrs Naas’s grooming could respond (as owners of the same make of vehicle, one humble, one a luxury model, passing on the highway silently acknowledge one another with a flick of headlights) was the Indian dingly-danglys the girl wore in her ears, answering the big fake pearls sitting on Mrs Naas’s plump lobes.

‘I’m not going to come in. I know how it is. . This is just some of my buttermilk rusks you liked.’

The girl was looking at the tin, now in her hands, at the painted face of a smiling blonde child with a puppy and a bunch of roses, looking back at her. She said something, in her shy way, about Mrs Naas being generous.

‘Ag, it’s nothing. I was baking for myself, and I always take to my sister in Pretoria. You know, in our family we say, it’s not the things you buy with money that counts, it’s what you put your heart into when you make something. Even if it’s only a rusk, ay? Is everything going all right?’

‘Oh yes. We’re fine, thank you.’

Mrs Naas tried to keep the weight on the balls of her feet; she could feel the spindle heels of her new shoes sinking into the weeds, that kind of green stain would never come off. ‘Moving in! Don’t tell me! I say to Naas, whatever happens, we have to stay in this house until I die. A person can never move all the stuff we’ve collected.’

What a shy girl she was. Mrs Naas had always heard Australians were friendly, like Afrikaners. The girl hardly smiled, her thick eyebrows moved in some kind of inhibition or agitation.

‘We haven’t got too much, luckily.’

‘Has everything arrived now?’

‘Oh. . I think just about. Still a few packing cases to open.’

Mrs Naas was agreeing, shifting her heels unobtrusively. ‘Unpacking is nothing, it’s finding where to put things, ay. Ag, but it’s a nice roomy old house—’

A black man came round from the yard, as the lady of the house had, but he didn’t come nearer, only stood a moment, hammer in hand; wanting some further instructions from the missus, probably, and then seeing she was with another white person, knowing he mustn’t interrupt.

‘So at least you’ve got someone to help. That’s good. I hope you didn’t take a boy off the streets, my dear? There are some terrible loafers coming to the back door for work, criminals — my! — you must be careful, you know.’

The girl looked very solemn, impressed. ‘No, we wouldn’t do that.’

‘Did someone find him for you?’

‘No — well, not someone here. Friends in town. He had references.’ She stopped a moment, and looked at Mrs Naas. ‘So it’s all right, I think. I’m sure. Thank you.’

She walked with Mrs Naas back to the car, hugging the biscuit tin.

‘Well, there’s plenty to keep him busy in this garden. Shame. . the pergola was so pretty. But the grapes will climb again, you’ll see, if you get all the rubbish cleared away. But don’t you start digging and that. . be careful of yourself. Have you been feeling all right?’ And Mrs Naas put her left hand, with its diamond thrust up on a stalagmite of gold (her old engagement ring remodelled since Naas’s prosperity by a Jew jeweller who gave him a good deal), on her own stomach, rounded only by good eating.

The girl looked puzzled. Then she forgot, at last, that shyness of hers and laughed, laughed and shook her head.

‘No morning sickness?’

‘No, no. I’m fine. Not sick at all.’

Mrs Naas saw that the girl, expecting in a strange country, must be comforted to have a talk with a motherly woman. Mrs Naas’s body, which had housed Dawie, Andries, Aletta and Klein Dolfie, expanded against the tight clothes from which it would never burgeon irresistibly again, as the girl’s would soon. ‘I’ll tell you something. This’s the best time of your life. The first baby. That’s something you’ll never know again, never.’ She drove off before the girl could see the tears that came to her eyes.

The girl went round back into the yard with her tall stalk, flat-footed in the old takkies .

The black man’s gaze was fixed where she must reappear. He still held the hammer; uselessly. ‘Is it all right?’

‘Of course it’s all right.’

‘What’s she want?’

‘Didn’t want anything. She brought us a present — this.’ Her palm came down over the grin of the child on the tin drum.

He looked at the tin, cautious to see it for what it was.

‘Biscuits. Rusks . The vrou of the agent who let this place to us. Charles and I had to have tea with her the first day we were here.’

‘That’s what she came for?’

‘ Yes . That’s all. Don’t you give something — take food when new neighbours move in?’ As she heard herself saying it, she remembered that whatever the custom was among blacks — and God knows, they were the most hospitable if the poorest of people — he hadn’t lived anywhere that could be called ‘at home’ for years, and his ‘neighbours’ had been fellow refugees in camps and military training centres. She gave him her big, culpable smile to apologise for her bourgeois naivety; it still surfaced from time to time, and it was best to admit so, openly. ‘Nothing to get worried about. I don’t mean they’re really neighbours. .’ She made an arc with her chin and long neck, from side to side, sweeping the isolation of the house and yard within the veld.