Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘Well. There’s no other room for me, is there.’

  He arched his head back against the chair, expelled a breath towards the ceiling with its pine-knots and pressed lead curlicues all four of them, at times, took tally of obsessively.

  ‘We came to a sort of stop. About five months ago, after nearly six years. But we’d already accepted to do this, while we were still together, so we couldn’t let that make any difference.’

  ‘Hell, you’re a funny kind of woman.’

  It was said with detached admiration. She laughed. ‘You know better than I do what matters.’

  ‘Sure. Still—’

  ‘It’s because I’m a woman you say still—’

  He saw she jealously took his admiration as some sort of discrimination within commitment. He shied away. There came out of that mouth of his a careless response a city black man picks up as the idiom of whites in the streets. ‘That’s one I can’t handle.’

  He escaped her, taking up Africa Undermined aimlessly and putting it down again on his way out of the room.

  Charles returned from his daily run; part of the routine he had constructed for himself to support the waiting. His rump in satiny blue-and-red shorts rose and fell before motorists who overtook him and often waved in approval of his healthy employment of time. Eddie would have liked to come along (oh how long – five years – ago, as a seventeen-year-old in Soweto he had run in training, had ambitions as an amateur flyweight) but a black-and-white couple would have been conspicuous. Panting like a happy dog, shaggy with warm odours, Charles was brought up short, in the room, as when one enters where some event is just over; but all that he was sensing, without identifying this, was that he had been talked about in his absence.

  Although once she would have made a peg with fingers on her nose and so sent him off to shower, she did not now have the rights over his body to tell him he stank of good sweat; just smiled quickly and went on with her future tenses. He meant to go and get dressed but the need to know everything his colleagues knew, to follow their minds wherever they went, that would have made him a natural chairman of the board if he had grown up responding differently to propitious ‘circumstances’, led him to have a look at what chapter Vusi had reached in his book, and then, although he himself had read the book, to begin reading, again, wherever the other man had made his mark in ballpoint blue.

  Not suddenly – there must have been the too-soft impression before first Charles, then Joy became conscious of it – there was a voice never heard before, in the house where no one but the four of them ever entered, now. It was unexpected as the feeble cry of something newborn.

  Vusi came into the room with an instrument from which he was producing a voice. He passed Charles and stood before Joy, playing a muffled, sweet, half-mumbled ‘Georgia On My Mind’ – yes, that was it, identified as a bird-call can be made out as phonetic syllables humans translate into words. From those lips rippling and contracting round a mouthpiece, beneath his fingers pressing crude buttons, the song was issuing from an instrument strangely recognisable, absurd and delightful. Every now and then he drew a gulp of breath, like a swimmer. He played on, the voice gaining power, sometimes stammering (the peculiar buttons got stuck), occasionally squealing, but achieving the gentle, wah-wah sonority, rocket rise to high note and steady gliding fall out of hearing that belong to one instrument alone.

  While what they had to do was wait, Vusi made a saxophone.

  It was for this that he had collected the tabbed rings off beer cans. The curved neck was perhaps the easiest. It was made of articulated sections hammered from jam tins. Some of the more intricate parts must have required a thicker material. There might be a few cartridge cases transformed in the keyboard. He had worked on the saxophone shut up in the shed with the necessities stored there, as well as away down at the pigsties, where it was tried out without anyone else being able to hear it.

  The white couple marvelled over the thing. An extraordinary artefact, as well as a musical instrument. Having played it to the girl that first time it was ever played for others, Vusi was unmoved by praise because no one would see what they were really looking at, as laymen enthuse over something that can’t be grasped through their secular appreciation.

  He didn’t know Charles was reminded of the ingenuity of objects displayed in the concentration camps of Europe, now museums. These were made by the inmates out of nothing, effigies of the beautiful possibilities of a life to be lived.

  The municipal art gallery owns a sacred monkey. A charming image, an Indian statuette copied by a Viennese artist in glazed ceramic, green as if carved out of deep water. It lives in a cupboard behind glass. The gallery is poorly endowed with the art of the African continent on which it stands, and has no example of the dog-faced ape of ancient Egyptian mythology, Cynocephalus, often depicted attendant upon the god Thoth, which she has seen in museums abroad and has been amused to recognise as the two-thousand-year-old spitting image of a baboon species still numerous in South Africa.

  A set of pan pipes sticking up out of the bathwater: toes. A face reflected in the snout of the shiny tap bulged into a merry gourd with a Halloween mouth. She can look at that but she doesn’t want to see the distortion of her lower torso which is reflected if she leans her head, in its plastic mob cap, against the back of the bath. Her legs become gangling and bowed, joined by huge feet at one end and a curved perspective that leads back to a hairy creature, crouched. There is nothing beyond this voracious pudenda; it has swallowed the body and head behind it. She lies in the bath for relaxation. Nobody’s told her she’s dying, but they’re being brought down all around her, as a lion moves into a herd, tearing into the flesh of his victims. A breast off here; a piece of lung there; a bladder cut down to size. She lies on her back and palpates her breasts dutifully. There are ribs, but no lumps. The nipples don’t rise; that’s good, she doesn’t like the masturbatory aspect of what doctors advise you to do to yourself, as a precaution, in order to stay alive. These breasts don’t recognise her hands; they’ve known only male ones. Her hands don’t make them remember those.

  Despite the fun-palace image in the tap, her real thighs still have that firm classical roundness. They don’t pile like half-set junket round the knees when she’s standing. Not yet.

  The delicately engraved imprint of autumn leaves – a few vari-cosed patches – is more or less covered by a tan.

  However she lies, her stomach rises like the Leviathan.

  It was always there, waiting, flattened between the hip bones, for its years to come! She doesn’t take it too hard. These fantasies are the consequence of waking so early, and there’s a simple scientific explanation for that: reduced hormonal activity means you need less sleep. She nods her head in sage comprehension when this is explained to her; what it really means is you sleep eight hours after love-making. She feels them, other people, sleeping this sleep in other rooms. It’s true that as you get older you suddenly know what happened in childhood. She understands quite differently, now, the family joke she used to be told about how she crawled over to her mother’s bed at dawn, lifted her sleeping eyelid and spat in her eye. Oh lovers, I envy you the sleep, not the love-making, but nobody would believe me. I am told to disbelieve myself. ‘It’s something a doctor can’t really let himself prescribe . . . but you need to stop thinking you’re not interesting to men any longer.’

  Old stock; hers. She goes over it again, toes, thighs, twat (yes, put down the great notion it had of itself, temple of pleasure), nice breasts. The face can be left out of it, thank God, you can’t verify your own face by looking down on it in the bath, wiggling it, spouting its flesh out of the water and scuttling it to sink to the belly button again. This is not a bath with mirrors, far nicer, it has a glass wall that looks on a tiny courtyard no bigger than an airshaft where shade-loving plants and ferns grow, ingeniously and economically watered, in time of drought, by the outlet from the bath. They flourish in water favoured by this flesh as the Shi-ites
buy grace in the form of bathwater used by the Aga Khan. She ought to contemplate the plants instead. She feels she doesn’t want to, she doesn’t want to be distracted from what she has to see, but she forces herself – she must stop watching herself, and this makes her feel someone’s watching her, there’s a gaze forming outside her awareness of self, it exists for a moment between the greenery.

  Looking at the woman in the bath. Seeing what she sees.

  She thought of it as having struck her, first, as the head of antiquity, the Egyptian basalt rigidity, twice removed – as animal and attribute of a god – from man, but with a gleam of close golden brown eyes like a human’s.

  No. A real baboon, Peeping Tom at large in the suburbs.

  She had to think of it as that. If not (soaking herself groggy, seeing things), it would have to be her own visitation; a man.

  Eddie came upon some droppings not far from the back of the shed. They looked human, to him. All four went to the spot to have a look. The Kleynhans place was so isolated, except for the passage of life on the road, to which it offered no reason to pause. They had felt themselves safe from intruders.

  The hard twist of excreta was plaited with fur and sinew: Charles picked it up in his bare hand. ‘See that? It had rabbit for supper. A jackal.’

  Joy gave a shivery laugh, although there was no prowling man to fear. ‘So close to the house?’

  Vusi was disbelieving. ‘Nothing to eat there.’ The converted shed with its roll-down metal door was just behind them.

  ‘Well, they pad around, sniff around. I suppose this place’s still got a whiff of chickens and pigs. It’s quite common even now, you get the odd jackal roaming fairly near to towns.’

  ‘Are you sure? How can you know it’s jackal, Charlie?’

  Charles waggled the dung under Eddie’s nose.

  ‘Hey, man!’ Eddie backed off, laughing nervously.

  Vusi was a tester of statements rather than curious. ‘Can you tell all kinds of animals’ business?’

  ‘Of course. First there’s the shape and size, that’s easy, ay, anyone can tell an elephant’s from a bird’s—’ They laughed, but Charles was matter-of-fact, as someone who no longer works in a factory will pick up a tool and use it with the same automative skill learnt on an assembly line. ‘But even if the stuff is broken up, you can say accurately which animal by examining food content. The bushmen – the San, Khoikhoi – they’ve practised it for centuries, part of their hunting skills.’

  ‘Is that what they taught you at Scouts, man?’

  ‘No. Not Scouts exactly.’

  ‘So where’d you pick it up?’ Eddie rallied the others. ‘A Number Two expert! He’s clever, old Charlie. We’re lucky to have a chap like him, ay!’

  Joy was listening politely, half-smiling, to Charles retelling, laconically self-censored, what had been the confidences of their early intimacy.

  ‘Once upon a time I was a game ranger, believe it or not.’ That was one of the things he had tried in order to avoid others: not to have to go into metal and corrugated paper packaging in which his father and uncles held 40 per cent of the shares, not to take up (well, all right, if you’re not cut out for business) an opening in a quasi-governmental fuel research unit – without, for a long time, knowing that there was no way out for him, neither the detachment of science nor the consolations of nature. Born what he was, where he was, knowing what he knew, outrage would have burned down to shame if he had thought his generation had any right left to something in the careers guide.

  ‘You’re kidding. Where?’

  ‘Oh, around. An ignoramus with a B.Sc. Honours, but the Shangaan rangers educated me.’

  ‘Oh, Kruger Park, you mean. They work there. That place.’ Vusi’s jerk of the head cut off his words like an appalled flick of fingers. Once, he had come in through that vast wilderness of protected species; an endangered one on his way to become operational. Fear came back to him as a layer of cold liquid under the scalp. All that showed was that his small stiff ears pulled slightly against his skull.

  Charles wiped his palm on his pants and clasped hands behind his head, easing his neck, his matronly pectorals flexing to keep in trim while waiting. ‘One day I’d like to apply the methodology to humans – a class analysis.’ (He enjoyed their laughter.) ‘The sewage from a white suburb and the sewage from a squatters’ camp – you couldn’t find a better way of measuring the level of sustenance afforded by different income levels, even the snobbery imposed by different occupations and aspirations. A black street-sweeper who scoffed half a loaf and a Bantu beer for lunch, a white executive who’s digested oysters and a bottle of Fleur du Cap, – show me what you shit, man, and I’ll tell you who you are.’

  That afternoon a black man did appear in the yard. He was not a prowler, although he probably had been watching them, the Kleynhans place, since they’d moved in. He would have known from where this could be managed delicately, without disturbing them or being seen.

  He was a middle-aged farm labourer dressed in his church clothes so that the master and the missus wouldn’t chase him away as a skelm. But he needn’t have worried, because the master and the missus never appeared from the house. He found the two men who worked there at Baas Kleynhans’s place now, as he had done, farm boys. He had come to see how his mealies were getting along. Yes. Yes . . . There was a long pause, in which the corollary to that remark would have time to be understood: he had been circling round the Kleynhans place, round this moment, to come to the point – an agreement whereby he could claim his mealie crop when it was ready for harvest. These other two, his brothers (he spoke to them in Sesotho and they answered in that language, but when he asked where they were from they said Natal) were welcome to eat what they liked, he was only worried about the white farmer. Could they claim the patch as the usual bit of ground for pumpkins and mealies farmers allowed their blacks? He would come and weed the mealies himself very early in the morning, before the baas got up, he wouldn’t bring his brothers any trouble.

  But the young men were good young men. They wouldn’t hear of baba doing that. The one in jeans and a shirt with pictures all over it (farm boys dressed just the same as youngsters from town, these days) said he was looking after the mealies, don’t worry. Gazing round his old home yard, the man admired the new garage with the nice door that had been made out of the shed and asked why this new white man hadn’t ploughed? What were they going to plant? And what was his (Vusi’s) work, if this white man wasn’t going to have any pigs or chickens? They explained that farming hadn’t really begun yet. First they’d built the garage, and Vusi – Vusi had been working inside. Helping the farmer fix things up. Painting the house. Ah yes, Baas Kleynhans was sick a long time before he died, there was no one to look after the house nicely.

  The three black men talked together in the yard for more than an hour. They drifted towards a couple of boxes that still stood there, from Charles’s deliveries, and sat on them, facing one another, gesticulating and smoking, sometimes breaking the little knot with a high exclamation or a piece of mimicry, laughter. When the man took off his felt hat a lump at the centre of his dusty hairline was polished by the sun. The white couple got a look at them from the bathroom window. It was an opaque glass hatch that opened under layers of dead creeper. What was happening in the yard could have been seen and heard more clearly from the kitchen windows, but the white couple also would have been visible, there, and they could not understand what was being said, anyway.

  At first they felt only anxiety. Then they began to feel like eavesdroppers, spies: those who have no commune, those on the outside. The slow accretion of past weeks that was the four of them – a containing: a shell, a habitation – was broken. Eddie and Vusi were out there, yet it was Charles and Joy who were alone. They had no way of knowing what it was they were witnessing.

  The man wobbled away on an old bicycle, calling the dying fall of farewells that go back and forth between country blacks. Both the pair in the house and
the pair outside waited, just as they were, for about ten minutes. Vusi was silent but Charles and Joy (still in the bathroom, with its snivelling tap) could hear the continuing murmur of Eddie in monologue.

  They all met in the kitchen. The girl looked ridiculously breathless, to the two coming in from the yard, as if she had been climbing.

  ‘He used to work for the man who owned this place before. He wants his mealies.’

  Charles’s emotions, like his blood, flushed near the surface. He was testy when anxious; now, impatient with Vusi. ‘It took the whole afternoon to say that! Christ, we’ve been going crazy. You seemed to know the man. We thought – God knows what – that you were having to give explanations, that you were cornered – I don’t know? And what could we do? You seemed to be enjoying yourselves, for Christ’ sake . . .’

  As anxiety found release his tone drained of accusation; he ended up excited, half-laughing, rolling tendrils of bright beard between thumb and finger. Like a fragment of food, at table, a shred of leaf from the dead creeper round the bathroom window clung to the hairs.

  Eddie went to the fridge and took out beer. ‘We should have given him something to drink, but I couldn’t come into the white baas’s kitchen and just take. He must’ve wondered why we didn’t have any in his old room, man; I was scared he’d ask to go in there, and see no beds, nothing. I was already thinking could I say we had girlfriends somewhere, where we sleep. But he knows everybody for miles around this place.’

  They discussed the man and decided there was nothing they could do except hope he would not come back too shortly. Soon it would not matter any more if he did.

  Joy did not look at Charles but directed a remark at him: ‘If we have to stay much longer I’ll have to start wearing a pillow. When I met our friend the estate agent’s wife at the chemist’s last week she had a good look at me. “You don’t show yet, do you, dear?” ’