Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘Ou Piet! Kêrel! What did you do to the koeksusters, hey?’ he called out joyously.

  A shout came that meant ‘Right away.’ The black man appeared, drying his hands on a rag, with the diffident, kidding manner of someone who knows he has excelled himself.

  ‘Whatsa matter with the koeksusters, man?’

  Piet shrugged. ‘You must tell me. I don’t know what’s matter.’

  ‘Here, bring me some more, man.’ The young man shoved the empty plate at him, with a grin. And as the other went off, laughing, the young man called, ‘You must always make them like that, see?’

  He liked to drink at celebrations, at weddings or Christmas, but he wasn’t a man who drank his brandy every day. He would have two brandies on a Saturday afternoon, when the week’s work was over, and for the rest of the time, the bottle that he brought from Francistown when he went to collect stores lay in the chest in his tent. But on this last night he got up from the fire on impulse and went over to the tent to fetch the bottle (one thing he didn’t do, he didn’t expect a kaffir to handle his drink for him; it was too much of a temptation to put in their way). He brought a glass with him, too, one of a set of six made of tinted imitation cut glass, and he poured himself a tot and stretched out his legs where he could feel the warmth of the fire through the soles of his boots. The nights were not cold, until the wind came up at two or three in the morning, but there was a clarifying chill to the air; now and then a figure came over from the black men’s camp to put another log on the fire whose flames had dropped and become blue. The young man felt inside himself a similar low incandescence; he poured himself another brandy. The long yelping of the jackals prowled the sky without, like the wind about a house; there was no house, but the sounds beyond the light his fire tremblingly inflated into the dark – that jumble of meaningless voices, crying babies, coughs and hawking – had built walls to enclose and a roof to shelter. He was exposed, turning naked to space on the sphere of the world as the speck that is a fly plastered on the window of an aeroplane, but he was not aware of it.

  The lilt of various kinds of small music began and died in the dark; threads of notes, blown and plucked, that disappeared under the voices. Presently a huge man whose thick black body had strained apart every seam in his ragged pants and shirt loped silently into the light and dropped just within it, not too near the fire. His feet, intimately crossed, were cracked and weathered like driftwood. He held to his mouth a one-stringed instrument shaped like a lyre, made out of a half-moon of bent wood with a ribbon of dried palm leaf tied from tip to tip. His big lips rested gently on the strip and while he blew, his one hand, by controlling the vibration of the palm leaf, made of his breath a small, faint, perfect music. It was caught by the very limits of the capacity of the human ear; it was almost out of range. The first music men ever heard, when they began to stand upright among the rushes at the river, might have been like it. When it died away it was difficult to notice at what point it really had gone.

  ‘Play that other one,’ said the young man, in Tswana. Only the smoke from his pipe moved.

  The pink-palmed hands settled down round the instrument. The thick, tender lips were wet once. The faint desolate voice spoke again, so lonely a music that it came to the player and listener as if they heard it inside themselves. This time the player took a short stick in his other hand and, while he blew, scratched it back and forth inside the curve of the lyre, where the notches cut there produced a dry, shaking, slithering sound, like the far-off movement of dancers’ feet. There were two or three figures with more substance than the shadows, where the firelight merged with the darkness. They came and squatted. One of them had half a paraffin tin, with a wooden neck and other attachments of gut and wire. When the lyre-player paused, lowering his piece of stick and leaf slowly, in ebb, from his mouth, and wiping his lips on the back of his hand, the other began to play. It was a thrumming, repetitive, banjo tune. The young man’s boot patted the sand in time to it and he took it up with hand-claps once or twice. A thin, yellowish man in an old hat pushed his way to the front past sarcastic remarks and twittings and sat on his haunches with a little clay bowl between his feet. Over its mouth there was a keyboard of metal tongues. After some exchange, he played it and the others sang low and nasally, bringing a few more strollers to the fire. The music came to an end, pleasantly, and started up again, like a breath drawn. In one of the intervals the young man said, ‘Let’s have a look at that contraption of yours, isn’t it a new one?’ and the man to whom he signalled did not understand what was being said to him but handed over his paraffin-tin mandolin with pride and also with amusement at his own handiwork.

  The young man turned it over, twanged it once, grinning and shaking his head. Two bits of string and an old jam tin and they’ll make a whole band, man. He’d heard them playing some crazy-looking things. The circle of faces watched him with pleasure; they laughed and lazily remarked to each other; it was a funny-looking thing, all right, but it worked. The owner took it back and played it, clowning a little. The audience laughed and joked appreciatively; they were sitting close in to the fire now, painted by it.

  ‘Next week’ – the young man raised his voice gaily – ‘next week when I come back, I bring radio with me, plenty real music. All the big white bands play over it—’

  Someone who had once worked in Johannesburg said, ‘Satchmo,’ and the others took it up, understanding that this was the word for what the white man was going to bring from town. Satchmo. Satch-mo. They tried it out, politely.

  ‘Music, just like at a big white dance in town. Next week.’ A friendly, appreciative silence fell, with them all resting back in the warmth of the fire and looking at him indulgently. A strange thing happened to him. He felt hot, over first his neck, then his ears and his face. It didn’t matter, of course; by next week they would have forgotten. They wouldn’t expect it. He shut down his mind on a picture of them, hanging round the caravan to listen, and him coming out on the steps to tell them—

  He thought for a moment that he would give them the rest of the bottle of brandy. Hell, no, man, it was mad. If they got the taste for the stuff, they’d be pinching it all the time. He’d give Piet some sugar and yeast and things from the stores, for them to make beer tomorrow when he was gone. He put his hands deep in his pockets and stretched out to the fire with his head sunk on his chest. The lyre-player picked up his flimsy piece of wood again, and slowly what the young man was feeling inside himself seemed to find a voice; up into the night beyond the fire, it went, uncoiling from his breast and bringing ease. As if it had been made audible out of infinity and could be returned to infinity at any point, the lonely voice of the lyre went on and on. Nobody spoke, the barriers of tongues fell with silence. The whole dirty tide of worry and planning had gone out of the young man. The small, high moon, outshone by a spiky spread of cold stars, repeated the shape of the lyre. He sat for he was not aware how long, just as he had for so many other nights, with the stars at his head and the fire at his feet.

  But at last the music stopped and time began again. There was tonight; there was tomorrow, when he was going to drive to Francistown. He stood up; the company fragmented. The lyre-player blew his nose into his fingers. Dusty feet took their accustomed weight. They went off to their tents and he went off to his. Faint plangencies followed them. The young man gave a loud, ugly, animal yawn, the sort of unashamed personal noise a man can make when he lives alone. He walked very slowly across the sand; it was dark but he knew the way more surely than with his eyes. ‘Piet! Hey!’ he bawled as he reached his tent. ‘You get up early tomorrow, eh? And I don’t want to hear the lorry won’t start. You get it going and then you call me. D’you hear?’

  He was lighting the oil lamp that Piet had left ready on the chest and as it came up softly it brought the whole interior of the tent with it: the chest, the bed, the clock and the coy smiling face of the seventeen-year-old girl. He sat down on the bed, sliding his palms through the silky fur of th
e kaross. He drew a breath and held it for a moment, looking round purposefully. And then he picked up the photograph, folded the cardboard support back flat to the frame, and put it in the chest with all his other things, ready for the journey.

  Livingstone’s Companions

  Livingstone’s Companions

  In the House that afternoon the Minister of Foreign Affairs was giving his report on the President’s visit to Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. ‘I would like to take a few minutes to convey to you the scene when we arrived at the airport,’ he was saying, in English, and as he put the top sheet of his sheaf of notes under the last, settling down to it, Carl Church in the press gallery tensed and relaxed his thigh muscles – a gesture of resignation. ‘It’s hard to describe the enthusiasm that greeted the President everywhere he went. Everywhere crowds, enormous crowds. If those people who criticise the President’s policies and cry neo-colonialism when he puts the peace and prosperity of our country first—’

  There were no Opposition benches since the country was a one-party state, but the dissident faction within the party slumped, blank-faced, while a deep hum of encouragement came from two solid rows of the President’s supporters seated just in front of Carl Church.

  ‘. . . those who are so quick to say that our President’s policies are out of line with the OAU could see how enthusiastically the President is received in fellow member states of the OAU, they would think before they shout, believe me. They would see it is they who are out of line, who fail to understand the problems of Pan-Africa, they who would like to see our crops rot in the fields, our people out of work, our development plans come to a full stop’ – assent swarmed, the hum rose – ‘and all for an empty gesture of fist-shaking’ – the two close-packed rows were leaning forward delightedly; polished shoes drummed the floor – ‘they know as well as you and I will not free the African peoples of the white-supremacy states south of our borders.’

  The Foreign Minister turned to the limelight of approval. The President himself was not in the House; some members watched the clock (gift of the United States Senate) whose graceful copper hand moved with a hiccup as each minute passed. The Speaker in his long curly wig was propped askew against the tall back of his elaborate chair. His clerk, with the white pompadour, velvet bow and lacy jabot that were part of the investiture of sovereignty handed down from the British, was a perfect papier-mâché blackamoor from an eighteenth-century slave trader’s drawing room. The House was panelled in local wood whose scent the sterile blast of the air-conditioning had not yet had time to evaporate entirely. Carl Church stayed on because of the coolness, the restful incense of new wood – the Foreign Minister’s travelogue wasn’t worth two lines of copy. Between the Minister and the President’s claque the dialogue of banal statement and deep-chested response went on beamingly, obliviously.

  ‘. . . can assure you . . . full confidence lies in . . .’

  Suddenly the Speaker made an apologetic but firm gesture to attract the Minister’s attention: ‘Mr Minister, would it be convenient to adjourn at this point . . . ?’

  The clique filed jovially out of the House. The Chamberlain came into the foyer carrying his belly before turned-out thighs, his fine African calves looking well in courtier’s stockings, silver buckles flashing on his shoes. Waylaid on the stairs by another journalist, the Minister was refusing an interview with the greatest amiability, in the volume of voice he had used in the House, as if someone had forgotten to turn off the public address system.

  With the feeling that he had dozed through a cinema matinée, Carl Church met the glare of the afternoon as a dull flash of pain above his right eye. His hired car was parked in the shade of the building – these were the little ways in which he made some attempt to look after himself: calculating the movement of the sun when in hot countries, making sure that the hotel bed wasn’t damp, in cold ones. He drove downhill to the offices of the broadcasting station, where his paper had arranged telex facilities. In the prematurely senile building, unfinished and decaying after five years, the unevenness of the concrete floors underfoot increased his sensation of slowed reactions. He simply looked in to see if there was anything for him; the day before he had sent a long piece on the secessionist movement in the Southern Province and there just might be a word of commendation from the Africa desk. There was something: ‘100 YEARS ANNIVERSARY ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY PARTY SENT SEARCH FOR LIVINGSTONE STOP YOU WELL PLACED RETRACE STEPS LIVINGSTONES LAST JOURNEY SUGGEST LAKES OR INTERIOR STOP THREE THOUSAND WORDS SPECIAL FEATURE 16TH STOP THANKS BARTRAM.’

  He wanted to fling open bloody Bartram’s bloody door – the words were in his mouth, overtaking each other. Church is out there, he’ll come up with the right sort of thing. Remember his ‘Peacock Throne’ piece? Oh yes. He had been sent to Iran for the coronation of the Shahanshah, he was marked down to have to do these beautiful, wryly understated sidelights. Just as a means of self-expression, between running about after Under Ministers and party bosses and driving through the bush at a hundred in the shade to look at rice fields planned by the Chinese and self-help pig farms run by the Peace Corps, and officially non-existent guerrilla training camps for political refugees from neighbouring countries. He could put a call through to London. How squeakily impotent the voice wavering across the radio telephone. Or he could telex a blast; watch all the anticipated weariness, boredom and exasperation punching a domino pattern on clean white tape.

  Slowly pressure subsided from his temples. He was left sulkily nursing the grievance: don’t even realise the ‘lakes and interior’ are over the border! In the next country. Don’t even know that. The car whined up the hill again (faulty differential this one had) to the office full of dead flies and posters of ski slopes where the airline agency girl sat. There was a Viscount the next day, a local Dakota the day after. ‘I’ll wait-list you. You’re sure to get on. Just be at the airport half an hour early.’

  He was there before anybody. Such a pretty black girl at the weigh-bay; she said with her soft, accented English, ‘It looks good. You’re top of the list, don’t worry, sir.’

  ‘I’m not worried, I assure you.’ But it became a point of honour, like the obligation to try to win in some silly game – once you’d taken the trouble to get to the airport, you must succeed in getting away. He watched the passengers trailing or hurrying up with their luggage and – smug devils – presenting their tickets. He tried to catch the girl’s eye now and then to see how it was going. She gave no sign, except, once, a beautiful airline smile, something she must have learnt in her six weeks’ efficiency and deportment course. Girls were not beautiful, generally, in this part of Africa; the women of Vietnam had spoilt him for all other women, anyway. In the steps of Livingstone, or women of the world, by our special correspondent. But even in his mind, smart phrases like that were made up, a picture of himself saying them, Carl A. Church, the foreign correspondent in the air-conditioned bar (when asked what the American-style initial stood for, the story went that he had said to a bishop, ‘Anti, Your Grace’). Under his absurdly tense attention for each arrival at the weigh-bay there was the dark slow movement of the balance of past and present that regulates the self-estimate by which one really manages to live. He was seeing again – perhaps for the first time since it happened, five? six? years ago – a road in Africa where the women were extremely beautiful. She was standing on the edge of the forest with a companion, breasts of brown silk, a water mark of sunlight lying along them. A maroon and blue pagne hid the rest of her. On a sudden splendid impulse he had stopped the car (that one had a worn clutch) and offered her money, but she refused. Why? The women of that country had been on sale to white men for a number of generations. She refused. Why me? Well, he accepted that when it came to women, whom he loved so well, his other passion – the desire to defend the rights of the individual of any colour or race – did not bear scrutiny.

  Now a blonde was up at the weigh-bay for the second or third time; the black girl behind it was joine
d by an airline official in shirtsleeves. They consulted a list while the blonde went on talking. At last she turned away and, looking round the echoing hall with the important expression of someone with a complaint to confide, this time came and sat on the bench where he waited. Among her burdens was a picture in brown paper that had torn over the curlicues of the gilt frame. Her thin hands had rings thrust upon them like those velvet Cleopatra’s needles in the jewellers’. She puts on everything she’s got, when she travels; it’s the safest way to carry it. And probably there’s a pouch round her middle, containing the settlement from her last ex-husband. Carl Church had noticed the woman before, from some small sidetrack of his mind, even while she existed simply as one of the lucky ones with a seat on the plane. She was his vintage, that’s why; the blonde pageboy broken into curling locks by the movement of her shoulders, the big red mouth, the high heels, the girlish floral beach-dress – on leaves during the war, girls his own age looked like that. But this one had been out in the sun for twenty years. Smiled at him; teeth still good. Ugly bright blue eyes, cheap china. She knew she still had beautiful legs, nervous ankles all hollows and tendons. Her dead hair tossed frowsily. He thought, tender to his own past: she’s horrible.

  ‘This’s the second morning I’ve sat here cooling my heels.’ Her bracelets shook, dramatising exasperation. ‘The second day running. I only hope to God I’m on this time.’

  He said, ‘Where’re you trying to get to?’ But of course he knew before she answered. He waited a moment or two, and then strolled up to the weigh-bay. ‘Still top of the list, I hope?’ – in an undertone.

  The airline man, standing beside the black beauty, answered brusquely, ‘There’s just the one lady before you, sir.’

  He began to argue.

  ‘We can’t help it, sir. It’s a compassionate, came through from the town office.’