Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

The allusion swerved away from themselves. Vusi was still speaking. ‘Can’t give any other reason why he should have them in his power, so he’s got to scare them into it. Scare. That’s all they’ve got left. What else is in that speech? After three hundred and fifty years. After how many governments? Spook people.’

It was a proposition that had comforted, spurred, lulled or inspired over many years. ‘So?’ Charles’s beard jutted. ‘That goes to show the power of fear, not the collapse of power.’

‘Exactly. Otherwise we wouldn’t need to be here.’ Joy’s reference to this house, their presence and purpose, sounded innocently vulgar: to be there was to have gone beyond discussion of why; to be freed of words.

Eddie gave hers a different, general application. ‘If whites could have been cured of being scared of blacks, that would have solved everything?’ He was laughing at the old liberal theory.

Charles swallowed a rough crumb of impulse to tell Eddie he didn’t need Eddie to give him a lesson on class and economics. ‘Hell, man. . Just that there’s no point in telling ourselves they’re finished, they’re running down.’

Joy heard in Charles’s nervous asperity the fear of faltering he guarded against in others because it was in himself. There should be no love affairs between people doing this kind of — thing — (she still could not think of it as she wished to, as work to be done). She did not, now, want to be known by him as she knew him ; there should be some conscious mental process available by which such knowledge would be withdrawn.

‘Don’t worry. If they’re running down, it’s because they know who’s after them.’ Eddie, talking big, seemed to become again the kid he must have been in street-gang rivalries that unknowingly rehearsed, for his generation of blacks, the awful adventure that was coming to them.

‘They were finished when they took the first slave.’ Knowledge of Vusi was barred somewhere between his murmured commonplaces and that face of his. He was not looking at any of them, now; but Joy had said once to Charles, in a lapse to referents of an esoteric culture she carefully avoided because these distanced him and her from Vusi and Eddie, that if Vusi were to be painted, the portrait would be one of those, like Velázquez’ Philip IV, whose eyes would meet yours no matter from what angle the painting were to be seen.

Vusi and Eddie had not been on student tours to the Prado. Vusi’s voice was matter-of-fact, hoarse. ‘It doesn’t matter how many times we have to sit here like this. They can’t stop us because we can’t stop. Never. Every time, when I’m waiting, I know I’m coming nearer.’

Eddie crackled back a page to frame something. ‘Opening of Koeberg’s going to be delayed by months and months, it says, ay Vusi?’

‘Ja, I saw.’

Charles and Joy did not know if Vusi was one of those who had attacked the nuclear reactor installation at the Cape before it was ready to operate, earlier in the year. A classic mission; that was the phrase. A strategic target successfully hit; serious material damage, no deaths, no blood shed. This terrifying task produces its outstanding practitioners, like any other. They did not know if Eddie knew something about Vusi they didn’t, had been told some night in the dark of the back room, while the two men lay there alone on their mattresses. Eddie’s remark might indicate he did know; or that he was fascinatedly curious and thought Vusi might be coaxed, without realising it, into saying something revealing. But Vusi didn’t understand flattery.

Eddie gave up. ‘What’s this committee of Cape Town whites who want it shut down?’

Charles took the paper from him. ‘Koeberg’s only thirty kilometres from Cape Town. A bicycle ride, man. Imagine what could happen once it’s producing. But d’you see the way the story’s handled? They write about “security” as if the place’s a jeweller’s shop that might be burgled, not a target we’ve already hit once.’

Joy read at an angle over his shoulder, an ugly strain on the tendons of her neck. ‘Nobody wants to go to jail.’

Charles gave the sweet smile of his most critical mood, for the benefit of Vusi and Eddie. ‘Ah well, but there are ways and ways, ay? A journalist learns to say what he wants without appearing to. But these fellows sit with the book of rules under their backsides. . well, what’m I talking about — you need wits to outwit.’

‘What makes you think they even want to?’

‘Because it’s their job! Let’s leave convictions out of it!’

‘No, she’s right, man. If you work on these papers, you’re just part of the system.’ Eddie kept as souvenirs the catch-all terms from his Soweto days.

‘To be fair’ (for which ideal the girl hankered so seriously that she would not hesitate to contradict herself) ‘there are some who want to. . A few who’ve lost their jobs.’

‘Someone reads this, what can he know afterwards?’ A sheet went sailing from Vusi’s hand to join those already spread about the floor. ‘You must call in an interpreter, like in court, to know what’s going on.’

‘Like in court? Jwaleka tsekisong? ’ Eddie went zestfully into an act. A long burst in Sesotho; then in English: ‘He can’t remember a thing, My Lord.’ Another lengthy Sesotho sentence, with the cadence, glares and head-shakings of vehement denial: ‘He says yes, My Lord.’ A rigmarole of obvious agreement: ‘He says no, My Lord.’ The pantomime of the bewildered, garrulous black witness, the white Afrikaner prosecutor fond of long English words and not much surer of their meaning than the witness or the bored black interpreter:

I put it to you that you claim convenable amnesia.

He says he doesn’t know that Amnesia woman.

I put it to you it’s inconceivable you don’t remember whether you were present on the night of the crime.

He says he never made a child with that woman, My Lord.

Out of their amusement at his nonsense there was a rise of animation, change of key to talk of what or was not to be understood between the lines of reportage and guards of commentary; in this — the events of their world, which moved beneath the events of the world the newspapers reflected — the real intimacy latent in their strangeness to one another, their apparent ill-assortment, discovered itself. There was sudden happiness — yes, unlike any private happiness left behind, independent of circumstance, because all four had left behind, too, the ‘normal’ fears, repugnancies, prejudices, reservations that ‘circumstance’ as they had known it — what colour they were, what that colour had meant where they lived — had been for them. Nothing but a surge of intermittent current: but the knowledge that it would well up again made it possible to live with the irritations and inadequacies they chafed against one another now, waiting. Charles said it for them, grinning suddenly after an argument one day: ‘Getting in one another’s hair, here — it’s a form of freedom, ay?’

Apart from politics, there wasn’t much to engage, in Charles’s Sunday papers. One printed for blacks reported the usual slum murders perpetrated with unorthodox weapons to hand; a soccer club scandal, and deaths at a wedding after drinking tainted homebrew. The whites’ papers, of which Charles had brought several, and in two languages, had a financial crash, a millionaire’s divorce settlement, a piece about that monkey no one could catch, which had stolen a maid’s dinner.

Sunday torpor settled on the four. Charles slept with his beard-ringed mouth bubbling slightly, as Naas Klopper was sleeping ten kilometres away in his split-level lounge. Eddie wandered out to the yard, took off his shirt and sat on the back step in the sun, smoking, drinking a Coke and listening to a reggae tape as any young labourer would spend his lunch hour on the pavement outside whites’ shops.