Telling Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  The man was a great hero for half an hour. Then an old retired major who had lived in the district for many years and was a botanist and naturalist came over the sand, leaning on his little cane, and prodded at the monster lying there disfigured by blows and sand. ‘Leguan,’ the major said. ‘Old leguan – poor old lizard wouldn’t harm a fly. Must’ve been trying to get back to the lagoon.’ The major was quite right. The beast was not a crocodile but one of those giant lizards, the leguans, that are still fairly common all over South Africa but are careful to keep out of the way of man – as timid and, indeed, except for their frightening size and resemblance to the crocodile family, as defenceless as the chameleon. He would not have bitten the swimmer, and he was too stupid and clumsy even to use his weight to defend himself. The man had done battle with the most reluctant of dragons. So, with the wiliness of human beings, who hate to admit that they have been taken in and must turn their gullibility to advantage somehow, the people in the village and at the hotel were quick to make a kind of joke of the swimmer; where before his words ‘Could’ve torn one of those kids in half’ had made him seem the saviour of their children, now they saw something absurd in the dramatic way he had struggled to bring the creature in instead of making for the shore and his own safety. He went about the hotel for the rest of his holiday very much alone, and a little sullen perhaps.

  By the time my sister and I were in our middle teens, we had lost our taste for solitude and the gentle wilderness. Our childhood love of Durban returned – for different reasons, of course – and I think that then we came to love the place for what it really is: in many ways a fascinating city, even if rather dull and smug intellectually. One of our chief delights at this time was our discovery of the Indian quarter of the town, and the Indian market. We enjoyed turning away from the pseudo-American and neo-Tudor architecture of the shopping centre and wandering down wide Grey Street, where the shops were small and crowded together and the balconies picked out in gaudy curlicues, and here and there a silver minaret or cupola shone. Among the more conventional stores, which sold men’s outfitting in fierce competition, were shops full of gauzy, tinselled lengths for saris, and Indian jewellers whose crammed windows seemed almost to tinkle with rows and rows of long gold earrings, and pendants strung upon thread. Those shops that were especially designed to entice European visitors like ourselves burned incense. Their dry, sweet odour was pleasant after the hot street, where splashes of chewed betel nut looked like blood on the pavement. In the Indian market there were piles of sweetmeats coloured violent pink and putrescent yellow, which smelled as revolting as they looked. We would return from these small expeditions with a particular type of sandal, thonged over the big toe, or a pair of earrings that looked as if they had been stamped out of thin gold tinfoil and that hung from the lobe to the shoulder. The sandals were called, if I remember rightly, chappals, and I know they were imported from India, but I do not remember ever seeing an Indian woman in Durban wear them. The earrings, without the folds of a sari to back them up, looked cheap and foolish in Western ears.

  Like most South Africans, once I had been to Cape Town I wondered how I had ever thought Durban beautiful. Before I was quite grown up, I went alone with my father to Cape Town and we took a cable car to the top of Table Mountain. We stood there, on a clear, calm, perfect day, and, truly, for a little girl, that was god’s-eye look at the world. On such a day, you can see the whole Cape Peninsula, from Fishhoek on the one side, right around the ribs of mountain rising out of the sea, to Camps Bay on the other side. Some people even claim that you are looking at two oceans – the Atlantic on one side and the Indian on the other. But that is in dispute, for it is difficult to say where one ocean begins and the other ends. Anyway, the vast waters that lie before you are enough for two oceans. No peacock’s tail ever showed such blues and greens as the seas do from that height; all the gradations of depth are miraculously revealed, and, looking far, far down, where the colour crinkles and breaks into white near the shore, you see pale translucent areas in which the rocks show as boldly as if you were looking through the glass bottom of a boat directly above them.

  It is something splendid, an almost superhuman experience, to see the tip of a continent, alive, at your feet. I know that I stumbled back to the cable station that day smiling constantly at my father but with the feeling of tears behind my eyes, in a confused state of exaltation that made it impossible for me to speak, and because I was so young, I immediately lost my exaltation in anger when I saw that many people who had come up with us on the cable car had been spending their half hour before the cable took us all down again writing postcards that would bear the postmark ‘Table Mountain’. These absorbed visitors scarcely glanced out of the windows at what they had come to see.

  For some reason, our family did not visit the Kruger National Park until I was sixteen and in my last year at high school. Just how unusual this abstinence is, is difficult to explain to anyone who is not South African. For whatever else the South African in general, and the Transvaaler in particular, may or may not do for his family, he will manage somehow to get them to Kruger Park, the great wildlife preserve in the Transvaal. If he has no car, he will borrow one, and if he cannot do this, he will persuade a friend that two families can travel as uncomfortably as one, and beg a lift. The Park opens at the beginning of winter, in late April or early May, and by dawn on the opening day, cars and trucks loaded with camping equipment and tinned food are lined up in mile-long queues outside the various camps that serve as points of entry to the preserve.

  I had heard so many tales and seen so many home movies about the Kruger Park (‘My dear, and then the lioness walked right up to the car and sniffed the tyres!’) that I almost dreaded going. I regarded listlessly the prospect of overcrowded camps, boerewors (a coarse, highly seasoned sausage held in sentimental regard by both Afrikaans- and English-speaking South Africans) cooked over an open fire, and long processions of cars crawling along the dusty roads in the stern rivalry of who would sight the most lions soonest. But when we went, it was very different from that. We went in October, during the last few days before the park closes for the summer rains and the calm that is granted the beasts for their breeding season. We stayed at a camp with a beautiful name – Shingwedsi – and we had the shade of its trees and the red blossoms of the cacti almost to ourselves. The peace of the bushveld was scarcely disturbed by the few cars on the roads.

  The rainy season was a month off, but the first night we were at Shingwedsi the fantastic roar of a freak storm woke us at midnight and flooded the camp, marooning us for nearly twenty-four hours. During the next day, while we were shut in by drumming rain, my Uncle Robert, our mother’s younger brother, drank beer with and received the confidences of an engineer who lived and worked in the Park all the year round, watching over the boreholes that guarantee the animals’ water supply. At that period, I had just begun to read Hemingway, and it seemed to me that for the first time in my life something in fact had measured up to fiction. The engineer was just such a man as poor Francis Macomber might have chosen as an escort on a hunting trip. (And, on reflection, just such a man as Mrs Macomber might have wished him to choose.) He had a taciturn, world-weary air, and, in the cosy confinement of the rain, over the beer, he made Robert (since he was only ten years older than I, we girls did not call Robert ‘uncle’) feel that he, Robert, was the first person in years to whom he had been able to talk as he was talking, the first man whose sporting sense and sensitivity matched the engineer’s own, a man – at last! at last! – who instinctively would understand the boredom and tameness, for a man of spirit, of life in a sanctuary, with no one to talk to but gaping tourists. In fact, the engineer was one of those people who make others feel chosen. At five in the afternoon, when the rain had stopped, he stood up, flexed his tanned, muscular knees, and said, with a kind of stern, sardonic glee, ‘This is the time for elephant, if you want elephant. This water’ll keep the wardens out of my way for a day or so.’r />
  Robert and I were agog, as we were meant to be. While Robert questioned him, unconsciously adopting the engineer’s terse manner as he tried to show that he ‘belonged’, I kept close by his side, determined not to be left out of this. The way to see elephants, to get right up close to them and just about feel them breathe on you as you photographed them, said the engineer, was to take a light truck and go after them fast, ignoring the strict twenty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit in force in the preserve, and then, when you sighted them, to get out and stalk them on foot, ignoring the still stricter rule that no visitor may leave his car. Robert and I grinned with excitement. ‘But you can only do it when those bastards are sitting with their feet in mustard water,’ said the engineer, referring to the wardens. Well, that was now.

  Robert and I slipped away from the rest of the family – I was extremely anxious to have this adventure exclusive of my sister – and in half an hour the engineer had Robert, me, and Robert’s movie camera in his truck. While the wild passage of the truck through water and mud shook loose every nerve in our bodies, he told us that what we were going to do was perfectly safe, and then, almost in the same breath, that what we were going to do was terribly dangerous but that we need not worry, for he knew exactly how to do it and get away with it. I wanted to close my eves with the speed and exhilaration, but the leaps of a herd of impala deer that we had startled into a Nijinsky-like retreat of alarmed grace brought me out of my tense passivity almost as abruptly as the deer had been brought out of theirs. After about twenty minutes, we reached a river bed, and there, with their great columns of legs in the newly flowing water, stood three magnificent elephants.

  The shattering life of the truck came to an abrupt halt. The engineer said ‘There you are!’, and sent Robert and me stalking on foot. It seemed as if our hush of intensity had brought home to the engineer his boredom with this sort of adventure; he looked around for a dry boulder where he could sit and smoke his pipe while he waited. The truck was, I suppose, about two hundred yards from the river. When Robert and I were very near indeed to the elephants, and the beetle-wing whir of the camera was sounding, one of the great beasts slowly swung his head erect and towards us. Then he walked out of the shallow water, trailing his huge feet like a clumsy child, and advanced to within thirty feet of the camera, Robert, and me. And there the elephant stood, slowly flapping those wide, palmetto-like ears that African elephants have. I don’t think he seemed real to us; we thought only of the camera, and saw the elephant as he would loom on the screen rather than as he was, a slack-skinned splendid hulk, standing there before us. Then, all in the same instant, I smelled liquorice tobacco and felt myself violently grasped by the arm. The same thing must have happened to Robert, for at once we were jerked furiously around, met the impatient and alarmed face of the engineer, and were running, pushed roughly along by him, for the truck. I suppose it was the beating of my own heart that I thought was the pounding of the elephant coming up behind us.

  Driving back to Shingwedsi camp, the engineer grinned fascinatingly – it was difficult to say who was more under the spell of that grin, Robert or me – and remarked, ‘Those pictures will be quite good enough as it is. You don’t want to scare your friends, do you?’ And Robert and I laughed, to show that we, too, knew there hadn’t really been any danger. It was only next day, when our party had moved on to Pretorius Kop camp to see lions, that I suddenly remembered that the engineer hadn’t had to start the truck when we jumped in; he had left the engine running all the time. Some years later, I was told that there is reason to believe that when an elephant flaps his ears, he does it to fan the scent of his enemy more strongly towards his nostrils, in preparation for a charge.

  In a country where people of a colour different from your own are neither in the majority nor the ruling class, you may avoid altogether certain complications that might otherwise arise in the formation of your sense of human values. If the Chinese, say, remain a small, exiled community in Chinatown, and the Red Indians are self-contained on their reservation, you can grow up to have a reasonable standard of personal ethics without taking consideration of their presence. The problem of how you would behave towards them if you met them can be almost purely academic; you need not meet them, if you don’t wish to. In South Africa, this is not possible. There are people who try it, who arrange their lives for it, but they never succeed, for it cannot be done. Even if you are the most diehard reactionary, you cannot get away with it in a country where there are three million white people and nine million black and coloured.

  For me, one of the confusing things about growing up in South Africa was the strange shift – every year or two when I was small, and then weekly, daily almost, when I was adolescent – in my consciousness of, and attitude towards, the Africans around me. I became aware of them incredibly slowly, it now seems, as if with some faculty that should naturally, the way the ability to focus and to recognise voices comes to a baby in a matter of weeks after birth, have been part of my human equipment from the beginning. The experience of the warm black bosom of the mammy (in South Africa she would be known as the nanny) has been so sentimentalised that I must say I am glad it is one I missed, though not for the reason that I missed it. The reason was simply that my mother, like many good South African mothers from England and Europe, would not have dreamed of allowing any child of hers to nestle in the bosom of a dirty native girl. (That was exactly the phrase – a phrase of scornful reflection on those mothers who did.) And if, at the age of five or six, it had been suggested to my sister or me that we should go up and give our native servant a hug, we would have shrunk away. We accepted the fact that natives were not as clean as we were in the same way we accepted the fact that our spaniel had fleas. It was not until years later that it occurred to me that if our servants were not so well and frequently bathed as ourselves, the circumstance that no bathroom or shower was provided for them might have had a great deal to do with it. And it was later even than that when the final breaking down of this preconceived notion came about. I was a long time learning, and each stage of enlightenment brought its own impulse of guilt for the ignorance that had gone before.

  Our successive attitudes towards the Indians are another example of the disturbing shift in values that is likely to beset any child growing up in South Africa. The Indians are a minority group here, but even before their treatment became an issue at the United Nations, affecting the attitude of the rest of the world towards South Africa, they could not comfortably be ignored, because they belonged to the great mass of the Other Side – the coloureds. The Indians were imported into the country as indentured labour for the Natal sugar-cane fields in the mid-nineteenth century, and now, except for a considerable number of businessmen in Natal, a few traders in nearly every Transvaal town, and the considerable number who are employed in hotels and restaurants, they seem to be occupied chiefly as vendors of fruit, vegetables and flowers. In our East Rand mining town, the Indian traders were concentrated in a huddle of shops in one block, bought by them before the passage of what is known as the Ghetto Act of 1946, which, in effect, bars them from owning or leasing property in any but restricted, non-European areas. These were tailor shops, or they were ‘bazaars’ where cheap goods of all kinds were sold, and they were the object of dislike and enmity on the part of the white shopkeepers. In fact, a woman who was seen coming out of an Indian bazaar with a basket of groceries immediately earned herself a stigma: either she was low-class or, if her husband’s position as an official of one of the gold mines put the level of her class beyond question, she must be stingy. ‘She’s so mean she even goes to the Indians’ was the most convincing allegation of miserliness in our town. It was bad enough to be penny-pinching, but to stoop so low as to buy from an Indian trader in order to save!

  For some reason I have never understood, it was quite respectable and conventional to buy your fruit and vegetables from the Indians who hawked from door to door with their big red or yellow lorries. Our household, li
ke most others, had its own regular hawker, who called two or three times a week. Whatever a hawker’s name (and it was always painted in large, elaborate lettering, a kind of fancy compromise between Indian and English script, on his lorry), he was invariably known as Sammy. He even called himself Sammy, rapping at kitchen doors and announcing himself by this generic. There was a verse, parodying the hawkers’ broken English, that children used to chant around these lorries:

  Sammy, Sammy, what you got?

  Missus, Missus, apricot.

  There were many more verses with the same rhyme scheme, becoming more and more daring in their inclusion of what struck the children as giggle-producing obscenities, such as ‘chamber pot’, and a few genuine old Anglo-Saxon shockers, which they pronounced quite calmly.

  If you did not serenade the Indian with rude songs, and your mother was a good buyer and payer, he might hand you down a peach or a bunch of grapes from his lorry, but if you were an urchin without family backing, he would shout and shoo you away, lest your quick hand filch something while his back was turned. It is interesting to me now, too, to remember how yet again the bogy of uncleanliness came up immediately with the gift of the peach from Sammy; my mother, too polite to offend him by saying anything, pronounced such a warning with her eyes that I would not dare put my teeth to that peach until I had taken it inside to be washed. Sammy had ‘handled’ it. Sammy was an Indian. In fact, Sammy was Not White. Heaven knows, I don’t suppose the man was clean. But why did no one ever explain that the colour had nothing to do with cleanliness?