Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘No, no, Vusi. She won’t think anything. It was OK she saw you. She just naturally assumes there’ll be a black working away somewhere in the yard.’

  ‘And Eddie?’

  She placed the biscuit tin on the kennel, with its rusty chain to which no dog was attached.

  ‘OK, two blacks. After all, this is a farming plot, isn’t it? There’s building going on. Where is he?’

  ‘He went into the house as soon as I came back and told him . . .’

  She was levering, with her fingernails, under the lid of the tin. ‘Can you do this? My fingers aren’t strong enough.’

  The black man found the hammer in his hand, put it down and grasped the tin, his small brown nose wrinkling with effort. The lid flew off with a twang and went bowling down the yard, the girl laughing after it. It looped back towards the man and he leant gracefully and caught it up, laughing.

  ‘What is this boere food, anyway?’

  ‘Try it. They’re good.’

  They crunched rusks together in the sun, the black man’s attention turning contemplatively, mind running ahead to what was not yet there, to the shed (big enough for two cars) before which the raw vigour of new bricks, cement and tools was dumped against the stagnation and decay of the yard.

  The girl chewed energetically, wanting to free her mouth to speak. ‘We’ll have to get used to the idea people may turn up, for some reason or another. We’ll just have to be prepared. So long as they don’t find us in the house . . . it’ll be all right.’

  The black man no longer saw what was constructed in his mind; he saw the rusty chain, he leant again with that same straight-backed, sideways movement with which he had caught the lid, and jingled the links. ‘Maybe we should get a dog, man. To warn.’

  ‘That’s an idea.’ Then her face bunched unattractively, a yes-but. ‘What do we do with it afterwards?’

  He smiled at her indulgently; at things she still didn’t understand, even though she chose to be here, in this place, with Eddie and with him.

  The white couple had known two black men would be coming but not exactly when or how. Charles must have believed they would come at night, that would be the likeliest because the safest; the first three nights in the house he dragged the mattress off her bed into the kitchen, and his into the ‘lounge’, on which the front door opened directly, so that he or she would hear the men wherever they sought entry. Charles had great difficulty in sleeping with one eye open; he could stay awake until very late, but once his head was on a pillow sleep buried him deep within the hot, curly beard. She dozed off where she was – meetings, cinemas, parties, even driving – after around half past ten, but she could give her subconscious instructions, before going to bed, to wake her at any awaited signal of sound or movement. She set her inner alarm at hair-trigger, those three nights. An owl sent her swiftly to Charles; it might be a man imitating the call. She responded to a belch from the sink drain, skittering in the roof (mice?), even the faint thread of a cat’s mew, that might have been in a dream, since she could not catch it again once it had awakened her.

  But they came at two o’clock on the fourth afternoon. A small sagging van of the kind used by the petty entrepreneurs in firewood and junk commerce, dagga-running, livestock and human transport between black communities on either side of the borders with Swaziland, Lesotho or Botswana, backed down to the gate it had overshot. There were women and children with blankets covering their mouths against the dust, in the open rear. A young man jumped from the cab and dragged aside the sagging, silvery wire-and-scroll gate, with its plate ‘Plot 185 Koppiesdrif’. Charles was out the front door and reversing the initiative at once: he it was who came to the man. His green eyes, at twenty-eight, already were narrowed by the plump fold of the lower lid that marks joviality – whether cruelly shrewd or good-natured – in middle age. The young black man was chewing gum. He did not interrupt the rhythms of his jaw: ‘Charles.’

  The couple had not been told what the men would look like. The man identified himself by the procedure (questions and specific answers) Charles had been taught to expect. Charles asked whether they wouldn’t drive round to the yard. The other understood at once; it was more natural for blacks to conduct any business with a white man at his back door. Charles himself was staging the arrival in keeping with the unremarkable deliveries of building material that already had been made to the new occupiers of the plot. He walked ahead of the van, businesslike. In the yard another young man got out of the cab, and, with the first, from among the women swung down two zippered carry-alls and a crammed paper carrier. That was all.

  The women and children, like sheep dazed by their last journey to the abattoir, moved only when the van drove off again, jolting them.

  Charles and the girl had not been told the names or identity of the pair they expected. They exchanged only first names – Eddie was the one who had opened the gate, Vusi the one who had sat beside the unknown driver and got down in the yard. The girl introduced herself as ‘Joy’. One of the men asked if there was something to eat. The white couple at once got in one another’s way, suddenly unrehearsed now that the reality had begun, exchanging terse instructions in the kitchen, jostling one another to find sugar, a knife to slice tomatoes, a frying pan for the sausages which she forgot to prick. It seemed there was no special attitude, social formula of ease, created by a situation so far removed from the normal pattern of human concourse; so it was just the old, inappropriate one of stilted hospitality to unexpected guests that had to do, although these were not guests, the white couple were not hosts, and the arrival was according to plan. When sleeping arrangements came up, the men assumed the white couple were sleeping together and put their own things in the second bedroom. It was small and dark, unfurnished except for two new mattresses on the floor separated by an old trunk with a reading lamp standing on it, but there was no question of the other two favouring themselves with a better room; this one faced on the yard, no one would see blacks moving around at night in the bedroom of a white man’s house.

  The two zippered carry-alls, cheap copies of the hand luggage of jet-flight holidaymakers, held a change of jeans, a couple of shirts printed with bright leisure symbols of the Caribbean, a few books, and – in Eddie’s – a mock-suede jacket with Indian fringes, Wild West style. As soon as they all knew each other well enough, he was teased about it, and had his quick riposte. ‘But I’m not going to be extinct.’ The strong paper carrier was one of those imprinted with a pop star’s face black kids shake for sale on the street corners of Johannesburg. What came out of it, the white couple saw, was as ordinary as the loaves of bread and cardboard litres of mageu such bags usually carry; a transistor-tape player, Vusi’s spare pair of sneakers, a pink towel and a plastic briefcase emptied of papers. Charles was to provide everything they might need. He himself had been provided with a combi. He went to the appointed places, at appointed times, to pick up what was necessary.

  The combi had housewifely curtains across the windows – a practical adornment popular with farming families, whose children may sleep away a journey. It was impossible to tell, when Charles drove off or came back, whether there was anything inside it. On one of his return trips, he drew up at the level crossing and found himself beside Naas Klopper and Mrs Naas in the Mercedes. A train shuttered past like a camera gone berserk, lens opening and closing, with each flying segment of rolling stock, on flashes of the veld behind it. The optical explosion invigorated Charles. He waved and grinned at the estate agent and his wife.

  They had used all three Holiday Inns in the vicinity. They had even driven out to cheap motels, which were safer, since local people of their class would be unlikely to be encountered there, but the time spent on the road cut into the afternoons which were all they had together. Besides, he felt the beds were dirty – a superficial papering of laundered sheets overlaid the sordidness that was other people’s sex. He told her he could not bear to bring her to such rooms.

  She did not care where
she was, so long as she was with him and there was a bed. She said so, which was probably a mistake; but she wanted, with him, no cunning female strategy of being desired more than desiring: ‘You are my first and last lover.’ She was not hurt when he did not trade – at least – that there had not been anything like it before, for him, if he could not commit himself about what might come after. He was uneasy at the total, totted-up weight of precious privilege, finally, in his hands. He worried about security – her security. What would happen to her if her husband found out and divorced her? She didn’t give this a thought; only worried, in her sense of responsibility for his career, what would happen if his wife found out and made a scandal.

  His wife was away in Europe, the house was empty. A large house with a pan-handle drive, tunnelled through trees, the house itself in a lair of trees. But you are never alone in this country. They are always there; the house-boy, the garden-boy mowing the lawn. They see everything; you can only do, in the end, what it is all right for them to see and remember. Impossible to take this newly beloved woman home where he longed to make love to her in his own bed. Even if by some pretext he managed to get rid of them, give them all a day off at once. They changed the sheets and brushed the carpets; a tender stain, a single hair of unfamiliar colour – impossible. So in the end even his room, his own bed, in a house where he paid for everything – nothing is your own, once you are married.

  Ah, what recklessness the postponement of gratification produces, when it does not produce sublimation. (Could Freud have known that!) He had come back to the parking lot from the reception desk of a suburban hotel, his very legs and arms drawn together stiffly in shock; as he was about to enquire about bed and breakfast (they always asked for this, paid in advance, and disappeared at the end of an afternoon) he had seen a business acquaintance and a journalist to whom he was well known, coming straight towards him out of the hotel restaurant, loosening their ties against the high temperature. She drove off with him at once, but where to? There was nowhere. Yet never had they reached such painful tension of arousal, not touching or speaking as she drove. In the heat wave that afternoon she took a road to the old mine dumps. There, hidden from the freeway by Pharaonic pyramids of sand from which gold had been extracted by the cyanide process, she took off the wisp of nylon and lace between her legs, unzipped his beautiful Italian linen trousers, and, covering their bodies by the drop of her skirt, sat him into her. In their fine clothes, they were joined like two butterflies in the heat of a summer garden. When they slackened, had done, and he set himself to rights, he was appalled to see her, her lips swollen, her cheekbones fiery, the hair in front of her ears ringlets of sweat. In a car! The car her husband had given her, only a month before, new, to please her, because he had become aware, without knowing why, he couldn’t please her any more. She, too, had nothing that was her own; her husband paid for everything that was hers. She said only one thing to him: ‘When I was a little girl, I was always asking to be allowed to go and slide down the mine dumps. They promised to take me, they never did. I always think of that when I see mine dumps.’

  But today she had thought of something else. He made up his mind he would have to take into his confidence a friend (himself suspected of running affairs from time to time) who had a cottage, at present untenanted, on one of his properties. There, among the deserted stables of an old riding school, mature lovers could let their urgencies of sex, confessional friendship and sweet clandestine companionship take their course in peace and dignity. The bed had been occupied only by people of their own kind. There was a refrigerator; ice and whisky. Sometimes she arrived with a rose and put it in a glass beside the bed. He couldn’t remember when last he read a poem, since leaving school; or would again. She brought an old book with her maiden name on the flyleaf and read Pablo Neruda to him. Afterwards they fell asleep, and then woke to make love once more before losing each other safely in the rush-hour traffic back to town. (After the encounter at the hotel, they had decided it was best to travel separately.)

  They were secure in that cottage – for as long as they would need security. Sometimes he would find the opportunity to remark: we are not children. I know, she would agree. He could be reassured she accepted that love could only have its span and must end without tears. One late afternoon they were lying timelessly, although they had less than half an hour left (it was the way to deal with an association absolutely restricted to the hours between three and six), naked, quiet, her hand languidly comforting his lolling penis, when they heard a scratching at the ox-eye window above the bedhead. He sat up. Jumped up, standing on the bed. She rolled over on to her face. There was the sound of something, feet, a body, landing on earth, scuffling, slap of branches. A spray of the old bougainvillaea that climbed the roof snapped back against the window. The window was empty.

  He gently freed her face from the pillow. ‘It’s all right.’

  She lay there looking at him. ‘She’s hired someone to follow you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘I know it. Did you see? A white man?’

  He began to dress.

  ‘Don’t go out, my darling. For God’s sake! Wait for him to go away.’

  He sat on the side of the bed, in shirt and trousers. They listened for the sound of a car leaving. They knew why they had not heard it arrive; they had been making love.

  Still no sound of a car.

  ‘He must have walked through the bushes, all the way from the road.’

  Her lover was deeply silent and thoughtful; as if this that had happened to them were something to which there was a way out, a solution!

  ‘Somehow climbed up the bougainvillaea.’ She began to shiver.

  ‘It could have been a cat, you know, gone wild. Trying to get in. There are always cats around stables.’

  ‘Oh no, oh no.’ She pulled the bedclothes up to the level of her armpits, spoke with difficulty. ‘I heard him laugh. A horrible little coughing laugh. That’s why I put my face in the pillow.’ Her cheeks flattened, a desperate expressionlessness.

  He stroked her hand, denying, denying that someone could have been laughing at them, that they could ever be something to laugh at.

  After a safe interval she dressed and they went outside. The bougainvillaea would give foothold up to the small window, but was cruelly thorny. She began to be able to believe that what she had heard was some sort of suppressed exclamation of pain – and serve the bastard right. Then they searched the ground for shoe prints but found nothing. The red earth crumbled with worm-shredded leaves would have packed down under the soles of shoes, but, as he pointed out to her, might not show the print of bare feet. Would some dirty Peeping Tom of a private detective take off his shoes and tear his clothes in the cause of his disgusting profession? She a little behind him – but she wouldn’t let him go alone – they walked in every direction away from the cottage, and through the deserted stables where there were obvious hiding-places. But there was no one, one could feel there was no one, and on the paved paths over which rains had washed sand, no footprints but their own. On the way to their cars, they passed the granadilla vine they had remarked to one another on their way in, that had spread its glossy coat-of-mail over weakening shrubs and was baubled with unripe fruit. Now the ground was scattered with green eggs of granadil-las, bitten into and then half-eaten or thrown away. He and she broke from one another, gathering them, examining them. Only a hungry fruit-eating animal would plunder so indiscriminately. He was the first to give spoken credence. ‘I didn’t want to tell you, but I thought I heard something, too. Not a laugh, a sort of bark or cough.’

  Suddenly she had him by the waist, her head against his chest, they were laughing and giddy together. ‘Poor monkey. Poor, poor old lonely monkey. Well, he’s lucky; he can rest assured we won’t tell anyone where to find him.’

  When she was in her car, he lingered at her face, as always, turned to him through the window. There was curiosity mingled with tenderness in his. ‘You don�
��t mind a monkey watching us making love?’

  She looked back at him with the honesty that she industriously shored up against illusions of any kind, preparing herself for – some day – their last afternoon. ‘No, I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all.’

  While Charles drove about the country fetching what was needed – sometimes away several days, covering long distances – Vusi and Eddie bricked up the fourth wall of the shed. The girl insisted on helping although she knew nothing about the type of work. ‘Just show me.’ That was her humble yet obstinate plea. She learnt how to mix cement in a puddle of the right consistency. Her long skinny arms with the blue vein running down the inside of the elbows were stronger than they looked; she steadied timber for the door-frame. The only thing was, she didn’t seem to want to cook. They would rather have had her cook better meals for them than help with what they could have managed for themselves. She seemed to expect everyone in the house to prepare his own meals when he might feel hungry. The white man, Charles, did so, or cooked with her; this must be some special arrangement decided between them, a black woman would always cook every night for her lover, indeed for all the men in the house. She went to town once a week, when the combi was available, to buy food, but the kind of thing she bought was not what they wanted, what they felt like eating for these few weeks when they were sure there would be food available. Yoghurt, cheese, brown rice, nuts and fruit – the fruit was nice (Vusi had not seen apricots for so long, he ate a whole bagful at a sitting) but the frozen pork sausages she brought for them (she and Charles were vegetarian) weren’t real meat. Eddie didn’t want to complain but Vusi insisted, talking in their room at night, it was their right. ‘That’s what she’s here for, isn’t it, what they’re both here for. We each do our job.’ He asked her next day. ‘Joy, man, bring some meat from town, man, not sausages.’