A World of Strangers

by Nadine Gordimer

  I followed John through the fence into the bush, carrying the soft, plump weight of my birds. As we searched for his wounded bird, we heard the voices of the other men, excited as the cries of boys on a beach. We went deeper into the bush, talking and purposeful; I had seen John’s bird come down, he had seen it flutter, half-rising again, once or twice. I looked all round the thorn-tree where I had seen it fall, but there was nothing, not a feather; was it that tree? Wherever you looked there were trees exactly like it; the moment I found myself five yards into the bush I knew myself to be in a place of uncertainty, and this was right – the beginning of the bush was like the middle, you did not go deeper into it in any sense but that of distance, for it was same, all the way. It reduced time and space to the measure of the sun’s passing across the sky and the tiredness of your own feet; I could well imagine that if you walked through it for ten minutes or ten hours, whether you went round in a small circle or covered miles in a straight line, you would have covered the same ground and have the same lack of sense of achievement. It had the soothing monotony of snow. John poked about and grumbled. ‘You see it’s hopeless without a dog in this stuff. We’d’ve lost yours, ten to one, if there’d been no dog.’ The setter swam steadily, head up, through a drift of thick grass, sniffed round thorny thickets as if they were about to explode. We didn’t find the bird.’ Lying low somewhere, under our feet.’ John reproached the dog, but she gave him a moment’s absent flick of the ears and went off again, her course erratic and mysterious as a water-diviner’s. The voices of the others were lost; alone again and in silence except for the clumsy passage of our bodies, we followed the dog through the indifference of the empty afternoon. I heard my own breathing and felt the prick of the thorns; they were thicker than leaves, on every bush and tree and bramble and, with scabby bark and crusted twig, gave everything the touch and feel of old men’s horny fingers. The enormous air paled; the sun was so withdrawn you could look right up into it, but the little scratchings of shadow from the bush did not seem to grow longer, but only to disappear in soft shoals of shadow that the grasses threw upon themselves, as the sea often seems to darken from beneath rather than from the failure of the light above. We went on, and, suddenly, the spasm of a muscle in a dream, three pheasant blustered into the air right before us. I was foolishly startled, and missed, but John, with that gasping intake of breath, wheeled on them and got one.

  Back at the car, Hughie and Eilertsen were already there. They waved and shouted as we came up; there was a dark heap on the roadside beside them.’ Where the hell’d you get to,’ yelled Hughie, extraordinarily cheerful and friendly, swaggering with satisfaction. ‘We heard you potting away in the bundu; what’s the score? Jesus, that was some flock came your way, we only got the lousy stragglers, the few that panicked and went the other way.’

  ‘He got four, I got three,’ said Eilertsen, turning a bird over with his foot.

  ‘Jesus!’ Hughie looked at what we had in our hands. ‘I don’t believe it! Whatsa matter with you, John, you paralysed or something? I ruddy well don’t believe it! And what’s that, a pheasant – one of them’s even a pheasant. Didn’t you chaps see a few hundred or so guinea-fowl over your heads?’

  ‘Hughie, man,’ John said worriedly, ‘I come up too fast. I know it. You remember, it was just the same last year. The first afternoon, I’m just too damned het up and excited.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Hughie resentfully, ‘only two.’

  ‘I did get one blighter, but he came down in the bush and even Grade couldn’t find him.’

  Hughie began to piece together the strategy of the first shoot: ‘Why did Patterson have to make right for the middle of the birds, like that? He should’ve gone round, and driven them down a bit.’

  ‘Who can tell?’ Eilertsen had the look of a man for whom almost everything is a little beyond him. ‘You never know what they’ll do.’

  ‘But that’s fine,’ John said eagerly. ‘That means they’re not wild at all, this year, eh? Did you see, Hughie? He went right up dose, eh? We couldn’t see a thing, where we were.’

  ‘If I’d’a bin him, I’d’a gone round a bit, that’s what I would’a done.’

  Patterson came out of the mealies with the happy, calm roll of a man who is smiling to himself. A duster of dark bodies hung from the hooks on his belt, bumping against his hip as he walked. As he drew nearer, I saw a feather, stuck in the band of the shark-skin cap. ‘Not bad,’ he said. A year of alcohol was beading, streaming, oozing out of his skin.

  Hughie was counting. ‘Three, and me and Eilie seven, that’s ten, twelve -’

  Eilertsen tossed the pheasant to him.

  ‘Thirteen, could be worse. Patterson, why’d you go straight for them, man?’

  ‘It was amazing,’ Patterson was telling John, while he smeared at his face. He had taken off the cap and his hair was brilliantined with sweat. ‘I felt as if they would have come up and eaten out of my hand. They simply ignored me. One old boy just gave me a wink and went on feeding. D’you remember the one-legged one? He’s still here. He’s with this lot.’

  At the sight of the car, as if at a reminder, the dog had dropped into exhaustion. She lay in the back, almost as inert as her prey. We drove back to the camp talking, scarcely listening to each other, and huddled comfortably together, rank and uncaring as animals in the loose, unquestioning association of the pack.

  While we were gone, the three Africans had collected wood and fetched water from the farmhouse. Hughie shook himself out of the car and at once began to shout and berate in the meaningless convention of men who are brought up in a country where there are many menials; the Africans, in the same convention, heard only the sense, ignored the words, and did the minimum of what was required of them. Two of the men were John’s servants, very black Nyasas with blank faces that looked worried the moment they took on any task. The other was Hughie’s own servant, a little snivelling Basuto with a face the colour of fear. Hughie bellowed at him harmlessly, as if he were deaf. He sat down on a camp stool and shouted, ‘Here! Come on, get my boots off!’ Then he was all over the camp, looking into everything. ‘These lazy bastards! How long d’you think this wood will last, eh? That’s no good, all that small stuff. You get on out there and bring some big logs. Makulu, Makulu, eh? Plenty big logs.’

  The darkness was cold. It came up around our legs and, as we stood around the fire, drinking the first whisky, the whole land became steeped in dark, while the sky took on the sheen of a wet shell. The shapes of the men changed clumsily as they put on pullovers and mufflers; I dragged out of the duffle-bag my souvenir of Zermatt. Meat had been brought from town for the first night’s meal, and John prepared and grilled it. Hughie opened a tin of beans and asked for bacon, butter, and various utensils John hadn’t got. ‘You should have one of those heavy iron pots, John, that’s the only way to do these things properly. Isn’t there a spoon with a long handle? Here! Find me a spoon, big one, one with long handle! – Jesus, this bloody thing’s burning me up.’ The unlikely-looking food was delicious, and with it we drank mugsful of red wine. We sat like spectators round the dance of the flames and the stars came out sharply and the dark seeped up and up. It was night, and in the great dark room of the world, we were a scene in somebody’s sleeping head, alight, alive, enclosed.

  We sat drinking until late. Wine brought out an innocence, a schoolboy crudity, in Hughie. His swaying, bobbing face, .smeared with the grease of chop-bones, hung above his mug in the licking light; he told old, long dirty jokes that one could listen to with the pleasant sense of recognition with which one follows the progression of a folk tale. He boasted about his dog; ‘If he was here and you touched me, like that – just touched me – he’d go for you. He’s not more than a year old yet, I reckon, but boy there’s nothing he’s not wise to. He never lets my kid out of his sight, I tell you, a Heinz fifty-seven varieties, and more sense than all your pedigrees.’

  ‘Poor old Grade, she enjoyed herself this afternoon.’


  ‘Well, give me pointers any day. I wanted to get a pointer, but then my kid wanted a pup and we bought this pooch. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if you couldn’t train him to be a gun-dog. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised. That dog’s so damned clever. And what a watchdog! You won’t see a kaffir pass our gate without crossing the road first.’

  While Hughie discoursed on the superiority of pointers over setters, Patterson and I dragged an ant-eaten trunk four or five feet long, on to the fire, and as the flame delicately explored it, and the heat of the fire penetrated it, the life to which it was still host abandoned it in panic. First came long refugee-columns of ants, and hurrying woodlice; and then that creature out of the zodiac, a scorpion. Eilertsen suddenly got giggling drunk, like a woman, and kept pouring himself more wine with an air of recklessness. ‘First damn time I’ve got like this since V.E. day,’ he tittered. ‘Reckon it’s time I had a few again.’ Hughie went off on a long disquisition on the habits of stomach ulcers, which were the cause of Eilertsen’s long sobriety. Hughie knew so many half-truths and fallacies about so many things that the self-sufficiency of his ignorance was awesome; it was impossible to be bored by him. To people who prided themselves on their sensibility, he would seem to be a person completely without imagination, yet the truth of it was that he lived in a fantasy, was possessed by the new witchcraft, the new darkness of the mind made up out of the garbled misconceptions of scientific, technological, and psychological discoveries he did not understand.

  Before he went off to bed, John called the servants to give them some wine. ‘Not too much, we don’t want them half-dead in the morning.’

  ‘Ach, give them brandy, man,’ said Hughie. ‘They don’t like wine. Give them each a tot of brandy. Kaffirs don’t really like wine.’

  A little way from our hollowed-out interior in the dark, the three men sat round a small fire of their own. They had eaten; they talked so low among themselves that in our row-diness, we had not been aware of this anteroom. It was true, they were pleased with the brandy. Each stood, watching it being poured into his mug; on the face of the elder Nyasa, Tanwell, a smile, sudden and soft as the flame that lit it, showed incongruously on the fierce squat blackness of his closed face. The Basuto clowned for his, while Hughie growled appreciatively and threatened to kick his backside. They went back to their fire with their consolation; it was plain that they didn’t enjoy this atavistic game of sleeping out. We had elaborate protective clothing, ground sheets, rubber mattresses, and sleeping bags, they had the blankets they slept in at home in the town. There was the unexpressed suggestion that they were naturally closer to nature, to put them back in the veld was like loosing wild things. But the Nyasas were close enough to a state of nature to know that, for man, the state of nature is the nest; the musky closeness there must be in the grass and mud huts of the tribe. The Basuto was a bleary-faced town-sharp man of about my age; I supposed that he would rather be gone to ground in Alexandra township or the tin and hessian of Orlando shelters.

  But in my blankets, dressed up for bed in all the clothing I could muster, I felt the comfort of the voices about me, the cosy, confident sound of voices that held no tone of doubt; voices for whom God was in his church, justice was in a court, and all the other questions of existence had equally glib answers. The warmth of the wine in my body and the cold of the night on my cheek gave me that sudden, intense sense of my own existence that is all I have ever known of a state of grace; and that, exaltation of self that it is, must be the very antithesis of what such a state really is.

  Patterson was pulling a woman’s stocking on to his head.

  ‘What’s that, a trophy?’

  He grinned at me. ‘My dear boy, it’s the best way in the world to keep your head warm. But you’ve got plenty of hair.’

  The others continued to stumble about the camp. ‘First damn time I’ve been drunk since V.E. Day, I’m telling you. . . .’ Giggles. ‘Look out there, you silly bastard, you’ll have the whole thing over.’ ‘Here, girlie, good Grade, good girl.…’

  I woke up to feel someone looking at me. It was the moon, staring straight down from a sky full of her great light without warmth, that weird contradiction of the associations of light. I pulled the blankets up over my head but I felt it, the eye that has no benison. The bundles of sleeping men were pale shrouds, the fire was silenced. Rolling out over the stillness there came a yowl from the entrails of desolation, the echo of a pack of nightmares. It stopped, and came again, and I did not think I heard it outside my own head. Suddenly, beside me, Eilertsen sat up whimpering in his blankets and fired three shots straight past my ear. The dead rose. ‘Good Christ, what’s the matter?’ ‘What the hell’s he doing.’ ‘I could see their red eyes in the dark,’ said Eilertsen, caught in the moonlight, ‘Just over there, in the bush.’ ‘Nonsense.’ When John was woken in the middle of the night he was not another self, like most people, but simply himself. ‘Jackal wouldn’t come that near.’ But after that, there was silence.

  Chapter 15

  In the mornings, the birds were frozen stiff where we left them on the roofs of the cars, and the bottles of beer that John put out specially were opaque with cold. Patterson lay helplessly in his blankets, waiting for coffee to come, but Hughie, with his gingerish bristles sparkling on his chin and his hair fiercely tousled, stumped about in impatience.’ Let’s go out and murder the bastards!’

  And with hands aching with the hard cold of the gun, we would follow him through a morning wet and fresh and strange as something torn from a womb. A rent caul of webs glistened on the thorns and the grasses swagged together in wet brushes. We heard guinea-fowl. We did not hear the doves or the starlings or the plover or the quail; only the guinea-fowl, like the words of a language one recognizes in a close murmur of foreign tongues. It seemed that they knew we were coming for them; there was the compulsion of an appointment between us; the birds were there and the men had come, and they must meet. When we rested in the camp, we heard them, were aware of them and felt strongly that they were aware of us. The flux and tension of the pursuit were completely absorbing, so that, in the heat of the day, when there was time to read, we did not read. The old fear, that had been bred into me, of finding myself with nothing to read (what would one do, caught somewhere, someday, without a book) was suddenly made harmless. I did not need to read. The books lay stuffed down in the duffle-bag.

  That was a wonderful hour of the day. The morning shoot ended at about half past ten, when we came back to camp after tramping through the bush and the mealies for nearly four hours. We had the sour, dissipated look of unshaven men who have not breakfasted, the look that is permanent with tramps. First we drank the beer which, carefully kept in the shade, held still the cold of the night. Then we cooked a meal without the customary limitations of meals; so long as you were hungry, John would produce another chop, more bacon, more kidneys. Then we took turns to use the tin basin for washing and shaving. Only Hughie did not shave; he went to lie in his tent – he was also the only one who slept in a tent, an inflatable thing that he put up with a bicycle pump.

  A noon silence fell. The sun was a power in the bush; nothing moved; the thorns glittered; Patterson took his shirt off and put it over his face to keep off the flies. My blankets were under a thorn-tree, but the shade was nothing more than a net between me and the sun. The doves sounded regularly as breathing.

  At some point when we were all asleep or seemingly asleep, Hughie would come quietly out of his tent with his gun and go off into the bush. Once he brought back a hare, a poor thing with ears full of bloated black ticks. ‘The boys’ll eat it,’ he said. ‘Here! Samuel!’ Bleary-eyed and sweating he would wait for us to make ready for the afternoon shoot, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand after a long drink of water, and keeping his head cocked, listening. ‘That crowd that feeds in the ground-nut field, they’re there already. S’tru’as God. They’re not resting in any bush.’ He watched us resentfully. And mostly, after the fi
rst day, when we were all out together he would leave us after the first few minutes, and disappear, with or without Eilertsen, for hours. We would find him at the car or back at the camp, counting his bag. He out-walked and out-shot everybody. ‘Let’s go and murder the bastards!’

  John said, troubled, ‘Kidd takes it all too seriously. You know what I mean? He doesn’t get a kick out of just walking through the bush.’

  ‘It’s his way of talking.’ Patterson was amused, as he might have been amused by an almost-human chimpanzee. He said to me later,’ That chap’s the most inarticulate blighter I’ve ever met. South Africans are a pretty inarticulate lot, anyway, don’t you think?’

  ‘He’s got plenty to say for himself about everything under the sun.’

  ‘Oh he’d chat to Einstein about relativity. But he’s only got a few words to get along with; they have to fit every conceivable situation. Makes him sound like a savage.’

  ‘That’s what he calls the two Nyasas.’

  ‘Those two gentlemen. I must say, they’re not more than one jump out of the trees; John really is unbelievably patient with them. I felt like giving that one careless little bastard a kick in the pants this morning – if he’d been my own boy. The way he gutted those birds, simply hacked them to bits.’

  ‘Well, it’s all relative, I suppose, this savage business.’

  He looked at me with curiosity for a moment, as if he had just remembered something. ‘D’you believe these black chaps could ever be the same as us, Hood?’

  I heard Steven’s voice, mimicking him perfectly. Yet Steven was not Patterson, was not even me; was not Tanwell and the other Nyasa, chopping wood ten yards away as if all tasks were one.