Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  Out in the country, even ten miles out, life is better than that. In the country, there is a lingering remnant of the pre-transitional stage; our relationship with the blacks is almost feudal. Wrong, I suppose, obsolete, but more comfortable all around. We have no burglar bars, no gun. Lerice’s farm boys have their wives and their piccanins living with them on the land. They brew their sour beer without the fear of police raids. In fact, we’ve always rather prided ourselves that the poor devils have nothing much to fear, being with us; Lerice even keeps an eye on their children, with all the competence of a woman who has never had a child of her own, and she certainly doctors them all – children and adults – like babies whenever they happen to be sick.

  It was because of this that we were not particularly startled one night last winter when the boy Albert came knocking at our window long after we had gone to bed. I wasn’t in our bed but sleeping in the little dressing-room-cum-linen-room next door, because Lerice had annoyed me and I didn’t want to find myself softening towards her simply because of the sweet smell of the talcum powder on her flesh after her bath. She came and woke me up. ‘Albert says one of the boys is very sick,’ she said. ‘I think you’d better go down and see. He wouldn’t get us up at this hour for nothing.’

  ‘What time is it?’

  ‘What does it matter?’ Lerice is maddeningly logical.

  I got up awkwardly as she watched me – how is it I always feel a fool when I have deserted her bed? After all, I know from the way she never looks at me when she talks to me at breakfast the next day that she is hurt and humiliated at my not wanting her – and I went out, clumsy with sleep.

  ‘Which of the boys is it?’ I asked Albert as we followed the dance of my torch.

  ‘He’s too sick. Very sick, baas,’ he said.

  ‘But who? Franz?’ I remembered Franz had had a bad cough for the past week.

  Albert did not answer; he had given me the path, and was walking along beside me in the tall dead grass. When the light of the torch caught his face, I saw that he looked acutely embarrassed. ‘What’s this all about?’ I said.

  He lowered his head under the glance of the light. ‘It’s not me, baas. I don’t know. Petrus he send me.’

  Irritated, I hurried him along to the huts. And there, on Petrus’s iron bedstead, with its brick stilts, was a young man, dead. On his forehead there was still a light, cold sweat; his body was warm. The boys stood around as they do in the kitchen when it is discovered that someone has broken a dish – uncooperative, silent. Somebody’s wife hung about in the shadows, her hands wrung together under her apron.

  I had not seen a dead man since the war. This was very different. I felt like the others – extraneous, useless. ‘What was the matter?’ I asked.

  The woman patted at her chest and shook her head to indicate the painful impossibility of breathing.

  He must have died of pneumonia.

  I turned to Petrus. ‘Who was this boy? What was he doing here?’ The light of a candle on the floor showed that Petrus was weeping. He followed me out the door.

  When we were outside, in the dark, I waited for him to speak. But he didn’t. ‘Now, come on, Petrus, you must tell me who this boy was. Was he a friend of yours?’

  ‘He’s my brother, baas. He came from Rhodesia to look for work.’

  The story startled Lerice and me a little. The young boy had walked down from Rhodesia to look for work in Johannesburg, had caught a chill from sleeping out along the way, and had lain ill in his brother Petrus’s hut since his arrival three days before. Our boys had been frightened to ask us for help for him because we had never been intended ever to know of his presence. Rhodesian natives are barred from entering the Union unless they have a permit; the young man was an illegal immigrant. No doubt our boys had managed the whole thing successfully several times before; a number of relatives must have walked the seven or eight hundred miles from poverty to the paradise of zoot suits, police raids and black slum townships that is their Egoli, City of Gold – the Bantu name for Johannesburg. It was merely a matter of getting such a man to lie low on our farm until a job could be found with someone who would be glad to take the risk of prosecution for employing an illegal immigrant in exchange for the services of someone as yet untainted by the city.

  Well, this was one who would never get up again.

  ‘You would think they would have felt they could tell us,’ said Lerice next morning. ‘Once the man was ill. You would have thought at least—’ When she is getting intense over something, she has a way of standing in the middle of a room as people do when they are shortly to leave on a journey, looking searchingly about her at the most familiar objects as if she had never seen them before. I had noticed that in Petrus’s presence in the kitchen, earlier, she had had the air of being almost offended with him, almost hurt.

  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 get
ting 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.

  I felt a little awkward, and did not know whether to go on hitting my golf ball or stop at least until the whole gathering was decently past. The donkey cart creaks and screeches with every revolution of the wheels, and it came along in a slow, halting fashion somehow peculiarly suited to the two donkeys who drew it, their little potbellies rubbed and rough, their heads sunk between the shafts, and their ears flattened back with an air submissive and downcast; peculiarly suited, too, to the group of men and women who came along slowly behind. The patient ass. Watching, I thought, you can see now why the creature became a biblical symbol. Then the procession drew level with me and stopped, so I had to put down my club. The coffin was taken down off the cart – it was a shiny, yellow-varnished wood, like cheap furniture – and the donkeys twitched their ears against the flies. Petrus, Franz, Albert and the old father from Rhodesia hoisted it on their shoulders and the procession moved on, on foot. It was really a very awkward moment. I stood there rather foolishly at the fence, quite still, and slowly they filed past, not looking up, the four men bent beneath the shiny wooden box, and the straggling troop of mourners. All of them were servants or neighbours’ servants whom I knew as casual, easygoing gossipers about our lands or kitchen. I heard the old man’s breathing.

  I had just bent to pick up my club again when there was a sort of jar in the flowing solemnity of their processional mood; I felt it at once, like a wave of heat along the air, or one of those sudden currents of cold catching at your legs in a placid stream. The old man’s voice was muttering something; the people had stopped, confused, and they bumped into one another, some pressing to go on, others hissing them to be still. I could see that they were embarrassed, but they could not ignore the voice; it was much the way that the mumblings of a prophet, though not clear at first, arrest the mind. The corner of the coffin the old man carried was sagging at an angle; he seemed to be trying to get out from under the weight of it. Now Petrus expostulated with him.

  The little boy who had been left to watch the donkeys dropped the reins and ran to see. I don’t know why – unless it was for the same reason people crowd around someone who has fainted in a cinema – but I parted the wires of the fence and went through, after him.

  Petrus lifted his eyes to me – to anybody – with distress and horror. The old man from Rhodesia had let go of the coffin entirely, and the three others, unable to support it on their own, had laid it on the ground, in the pathway. Already there was a film of dust lightly wavering up its shiny sides. I did not understand what the old man was saying; I hesitated to interfere. But now the whole seething group turned on my silence. The old man himself came over to me, with his hands outspread and shaking, and spoke directly to me, saying something that I could te
ll from the tone, without understanding the words, was shocking and extraordinary.

  ‘What is it, Petrus? What’s wrong?’ I appealed.

  Petrus threw up his hands, bowed his head in a series of hysterical shakes, then thrust his face up at me suddenly. ‘He says, “My son was not so heavy.” ’

  Silence. I could hear the old man breathing; he kept his mouth a little open, as old people do.

  ‘My son was young and thin,’ he said at last, in English.

  Again silence. Then babble broke out. The old man thundered against everybody; his teeth were yellowed and few, and he had one of those fine, grizzled, sweeping moustaches that one doesn’t often see nowadays, which must have been grown in emulation of early Empire builders. It seemed to frame all his utterances with a special validity, perhaps merely because it was the symbol of the traditional wisdom of age – an idea so fearfully rooted that it carries still something awesome beyond reason. He shocked them; they thought he was mad, but they had to listen to him. With his own hands he began to prise the lid off the coffin and three of the men came forward to help him. Then he sat down on the ground; very old, very weak, and unable to speak, he merely lifted a trembling hand towards what was there. He abdicated, he handed it over to them; he was no good any more.

  They crowded round to look (and so did I), and now they forgot the nature of this surprise and the occasion of grief to which it belonged, and for a few minutes were carried up in the delightful astonishment of the surprise itself. They gasped and flared noisily with excitement. I even noticed the little boy who had held the donkeys jumping up and down, almost weeping with rage because the backs of the grown-ups crowded him out of his view.