Nadine Gordimer - Life Times - Stories 1952-2007

Sergeant Chapman found a few mates occupying the chairs. He joined them. The hot weather left the brand of their profession where their caps, now lying under their chairs, had pressed on their foreheads. Their private smog of cigarette smoke mingled with frying fumes wavered towards the TV screen; he was in time for the last ten minutes of an episode in a powdered-wig French historical romance, dubbed in Afrikaans. It ended with a duel, swords gnashing like knives and forks. ‘Hey, man, look at that!’

‘But they not really fighting, themselves. The actors. They have special experts dressed up like them.’

‘OK, I don’t say it’s the actors; but it’s helluva good, just the same, ay. To be able to do it so fast and not hurt each other.’

Then came the Prime Minister, speaking with his special effects (a tooled leather prop desk, and velvet ceremonial drape as backdrop) on reconciliation and total onslaught. Conversations started up among the young policemen while he was projected overhead and the dinner customers chewed with respectful attention. Two plainclothes men in their casual-smart bar-lounge outfits came in to buy takeaways, evidently pleased with themselves, and did not even seem to notice that their volubility was making it difficult for people to follow the PM’s voice.

Sergeant Chapman took the opportunity to phone Mariella, although she knew he would be home late, if at all tonight. He still had these impulses to talk to her about nothing, over the phone, the way you can ten times a day with your girl. The telephone was not available to ordinary customers but the policemen knew they could use it. Its sticky handpiece and the privacy of the noise that surrounded him as he dialled were familiar. But Mariella did not answer with her soft voice of flirtation. She was terribly excited. He didn’t know whether she was laughing or crying. When she went into the kitchen just now to get herself some bread and cheese (she wasn’t going to bother with supper if he didn’t come) the venison was gone from the window. Gone! Just like that. She went outside to see if it’d fallen from the hook — but no.

‘No, of course, man, I put that hook in fast.’

‘But still, it could have fallen — no, but anyway, the hook’s still there. So I saw the meat must’ve been pinched. I ran to the street and then I rushed round the yard—’

‘You shouldn’t do that when I’m not there, they’ll knife you if you try to catch them. I’ve told you, Mariella, stay in the house at night, don’t open to anyone.’

But she was ‘so cross, so excited’ she fetched the torch and took the dog by the collar and looked everywhere.

‘That’s mad, man. I told you not to. Somebody could be tricking you to get you out of the house.’

‘No wait, there was nobody, Marais, nobody was there, it was all right.’

‘Well you were just lucky he’d already got away, I’m telling you, Mariella, you make me worry. There must be blacks hanging around the neighbourhood who know I’m often away late—’

‘No, listen, just wait till you hear — Buller pulled away from me and jumped over the fence into the lane, you know, there by the veggie patch, and he was barking and scratching. So I climbed over and there it was on the ground — only it wasn’t the meat and everything, it was just the bone. All the meat was torn off it! You’ll see, you’ll see the places where big teeth pulled away! It must have been that baboon, that monkey thing, no dog could reach so high! And there was an item on the radio about it only this morning! You’ll see, only a bone’s left.’ And now she began to giggle intimately. ‘Your poor Pa. He’ll be mad with you for hanging it like that. We’ll have to pretend we ate it, hay? Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know my jam’s OK. It set and everything. . What should I do. . send for the police? If it could be you that comes, I’ll be already making the bed warm. .’

Although she sounded so lovable he had to be serious and make her promise to keep all the windows locked. Apes were clever, they had hands like humans. It might even manage to lift a lever and get in, now that it had become so full of cheek. He came striding back to his mates with a swagger of sensation, a tale to tell. ‘You know that escaped monkey? Came to our place and swiped the Blesbok leg we brought from the farm yesterday! True as God! I hung it in the window this morning!’

‘Ag, man, Chapman. Your stories. Some black took it. Hanging it in the window! Wha’d’you think you were doing, man?’

‘No way, boet . It was that bloody thing, all right. She’s just told me: she found the bone there in the lane where it et it. Even a black’s not going to tear raw meat with his teeth.’

That one was a toughie, all right — the detainee. When Sergeant Chapman took over again, the bloke was so groggy — like a loser after ten rounds — but he wouldn’t talk, he wouldn’t talk. At about ten o’clock he passed out and even the Major agreed to call it a day until six in the morning. Sergeant Chapman told him about the venison. The Major thought it a great joke but at the same time suggested the Sergeant’s young wife ought to learn how to handle a firearm. Next time it might be more than a monkey out there in the yard. Sergeant Chapman ought to know the situation.

There had to be some sign that the plot was being cultivated. That was what black men were for; so Eddie hoed the mealie patch. Vusi kept to the house. He sat in his armchair and read a thick paperback whose pages, top and bottom, were splayed and puffed by exposure to climatic changes or by much thumbing. Africa Undermined: A History of the Mining Companies and the Underdevelopment of Africa : sometimes he would borrow a ballpoint from Joy, mark a passage. If he began to yawn and sigh this was a prelude to his suddenly getting up and disappearing into the back room. She would hear him tinkering there, the clink of small tools; she supposed it was to do with what was locked in the shed. She filled several hours a day with Teach Yourself Portuguese , but didn’t have her cassettes with her, here, as a guide to pronunciation, so had to concentrate on the grammar. Vusi could have helped her with German — but Portuguese!

‘How long were you there?’ He had trained in East Germany. That much she knew about him.

‘Two years and three months. We didn’t learn from books. You just have to begin to talk, man, you have to make people understand you when you want something, that’s the best way. But what d’you want to learn Portuguese for?’

‘Mozambique. Charles and I thought of going there. To live.’ She pulled her hair back down behind the arms of her glasses. ‘I might go, anyway. Teach for a while.’

‘What do you teach?’

She made an awkward face. ‘I haven’t much, yet. But I can teach history. The new education system there; I’d like to be involved. . in something like that. One day.’ The two words passed to him as a token that she was not deserting.

‘Ja. You’d like it. It’s going to be a good place. And Charlie, he’s learning too?’

‘He was. But not now.’

Vusi picked up her book and tried out a phrase or two, smiled at his poor effort.

‘You do speak Portuguese.’

‘Some words. . I was only there a couple of months, everyone talks English to you.’ He managed, with an accent better than hers, a few more phrases, as if for his and her amusement.

He sat in his chair again, waiting, his face as he himself would never see it, not in any photograph or mirror. He was possessed by an expression far from anyone’s reach, so deep in the past of himself, a sorrow he did not consciously feel there in the watergleam of his black eyes hidden in the ancient cave of skull, in the tenuousness of life in the fine gills of the nostrils, the extraordinary unconscious settling of the grooved lips — lips that, when he was unaware of himself, not using them to shape the half-articulate communication of a poorly educated black man’s English, held in their form what has never been, might still be spoken.