Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  From the beginning of the first term of the year he was fifteen Praise had to be coached, pressed on, and to work as even he had never worked before. His teachers gave him tremendous support; he seemed borne along on it by either arm so that he never looked up from his books. To encourage him, Father Audry arranged for him to compete in certain inter-school scholastic contests that were really intended for the white Anglican schools – a spelling team, a debate, a quiz contest. He sat on the platform in the polished halls of huge white schools and gave his correct answers in the African-accented English that the boys who surrounded him knew only as the accent of servants and delivery men.

  Brother George often asked him if he were tired. But he was not tired. He only wanted to be left with his books. The boys in the hostel seemed to know this; they never asked him to play cards any more, and even when they shared smokes together in the lavatory, they passed him his drag in silence. He specially did not want Father Audry to come in with a glass of hot milk. He would rest his cheek against the pages of the books, now and then, alone in the study; that was all. The damp stone smell of the books was all he needed. Where he had once had to force himself to return again and again to the pages of things he did not grasp, gazing in blankness at the print until meaning assembled itself, he now had to force himself when it was necessary to leave the swarming facts, outside which he no longer seemed to understand anything. Sometimes he could not work for minutes at a time because he was thinking that Father Audry would come in with the milk. When he did come, it was never actually so bad. But Praise couldn’t look at his face. Once or twice when he had gone out again, Praise shed a few tears. He found himself praying, smiling with the tears and trembling, rubbing at the scalding water that ran down inside his nose and blotched on the books.

  One Saturday afternoon when Father Audry had been entertaining guests at lunch he came into the study and suggested that the boy should get some fresh air – go out and join the football game for an hour or so. But Praise was struggling with geometry problems from the previous year’s matriculation paper that, to Brother George’s dismay, he had suddenly got all wrong that morning.

  Father Audry could imagine what Brother George was thinking: was this an example of the phenomenon he had met with so often with African boys of a lesser calibre – the inability, through lack of an assumed cultural background, to perform a piece of work well known to them, once it was presented in a slightly different manner outside of their own textbooks? Nonsense, of course, in this case; everyone was over-anxious about the boy. Right from the start he’d shown that there was nothing mechanistic about his thought processes; he had a brain, not just a set of conditioned reflexes.

  ‘Off you go. You’ll manage better when you’ve taken a few knocks on the field.’

  But desperation had settled on the boy’s face like obstinacy. ‘I must, I must,’ he said, putting his palms down over the books.

  ‘Good. Then let’s see if we can tackle it together.’

  The black skirt swishing past the shiny shoes brought a smell of cigars. Praise kept his eyes on the black beads; the leather belt they hung from creaked as the big figure sat down. Father Audry took the chair on the opposite side of the table and switched the exercise book round towards himself. He scrubbed at the thick eyebrows till they stood out tangled, drew the hand down over his great nose, and then screwed his eyes closed a moment, mouth strangely open and lips drawn back in a familiar grimace. There was a jump, like a single painful hiccup, in Praise’s body. The Father was explaining the problem gently, in his offhand English voice.

  He said, ‘Praise? D’you follow’ – the boy seemed sluggish, almost deaf, as if the voice reached him as the light of a star reaches the earth from something already dead.

  Father Audry put out his fine hand, in question or compassion. But the boy leapt up dodging a blow. ‘Sir – no. Sir – no.’

  It was clearly hysteria; he had never addressed Father Audry as anything but ‘Father’. It was some frightening retrogression, a reversion to the subconscious, a place of symbols and collective memory. He spoke for others, out of another time. Father Audry stood up but saw in alarm that by the boy’s retreat he was made his pursuer, and he let him go, blundering in clumsy panic out of the room.

  Brother George was sent to comfort the boy. In half an hour he was down on the football field, running and laughing. But Father Audry took some days to get over the incident. He kept thinking how when the boy had backed away he had almost gone after him. The ugliness of the instinct repelled him; who would have thought how, at the mercy of the instinct to prey, the fox, the wild dog long for the innocence of the gentle rabbit and the lamb. No one had shown fear of him ever before in his life. He had never given a thought to the people who were not like himself; those from whom others turn away. He felt at last a repugnant and resentful pity for them, the dripping-jawed hunters. He even thought that he would like to go into retreat for a few days, but it was inconvenient – he had so many obligations. Finally, the matter-of-factness of the boy, Praise, was the thing that restored normality. So far as the boy was concerned, one would have thought that nothing had happened. The next day he seemed to have forgotten all about it; a good thing. And so Father Audry’s own inner disruption, denied by the boy’s calm, sank away. He allowed the whole affair the one acknowledgement of writing to Miss Graham-Grigg – surely that was not making too much of it – to suggest that the boy was feeling the tension of his final great effort, and that a visit from her, etc.; but she was still away in England – some family troubles had kept her there for months, and in fact she had not been to see her protégé for more than a year.

  Praise worked steadily on the last lap. Brother George and Father Audry watched him continuously. He was doing extremely well and seemed quite overcome with the weight of pride and pleasure when Father Audry presented him with a new black fountain pen: this was the pen with which he was to write the matriculation exam. On a Monday afternoon Father Audry, who had been in conference with the Bishop all morning, looked in on his study, where every afternoon the boy would be seen sitting at the table that had been moved in for him. But there was no one there. The books were on the table. A chute of sunlight landed on the seat of the chair. Praise was not found again. The school was searched; and then the police were informed; the boys questioned; there were special prayers said in the mornings and evenings. He had not taken anything with him except the fountain pen.

  When everything had been done there was nothing but silence; nobody mentioned the boy’s name. But Father Audry was conducting investigations on his own. Every now and then he would get an idea that would bring a sudden hopeful relief. He wrote to Adelaide Graham-Grigg‘. . . what worries me – I believe the boy may have been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I am hunting everywhere . . .’; was it possible that he might make his way to the Protectorate? She was acting as confidential secretary to the Chief, now, but she wrote to say that if the boy turned up she would try to make time to deal with the situation. Father Audry even sought out, at last, the ‘family’ – the people with whom Miss Graham-Grigg had discovered Praise living as a beggar. They had been moved to a new township and it took some time to trace them. He found No. 28b, Block E, in the appropriate ethnic group. He was accustomed to going in and out of African homes and he explained his visit to the old woman in matter-of-fact terms at once, since he knew how suspicious of questioning the people would be. There were no interior doors in these houses and a woman in the inner room who was dressing moved out of the visitor’s line of vision as he sat down. She heard all that passed between Father Audry and the old woman and presently she came in with mild interest.

  Out of a silence the old woman was saying ‘My-my-my-my!’ – shaking her head down into her bosom in a stylised expression of commiseration; they had not seen the boy. ‘And he spoke so nice, everything was so nice in the school.’ But they knew nothing about the boy, nothing at all.

  The younger woman remarked, ‘Ma
ybe he’s with those boys who sleep in the old empty cars there in town – you know? – there by the beer-hall?’

  Through Time and Distance

  They had been on the road together seven or eight years, Mondays to Fridays. They did the Free State one week, the northern and eastern Transvaal the next, Natal and Zululand a third. Now and then they did Bechuanaland and Southern Rhodesia and were gone for a month. They sat side by side, for thousands of miles and thousands of hours, the commercial traveller, Hirsch, and his boy. The boy was a youngster when Hirsch took him on, with one pair of grey flannels, a clean shirt and a nervous sniff; he said he’d been a lorry driver, and at least he didn’t stink – ‘When you’re shut up with them in a car all day, believe me, you want to find a native who doesn’t stink.’ Now the boy wore, like Hirsch, the line of American-cut suits that Hirsch carried, and fancy socks, suede shoes and an anti-magnetic watch with a strap of thick gilt links, all bought wholesale. He had an ear of white handkerchief always showing in his breast pocket, though he still economically blew his nose in his fingers when they made a stop out in the veld.

  He drove, and Hirsch sat beside him, peeling back the pages of paperbacks, jerking slowly in and out of sleep, or scribbling in his order books. They did not speak. When the car flourished to a stop outside the verandah of some country store, Hirsch got out without haste and went in ahead – he hated to ‘make an impression like a hawker’, coming into a store with his goods behind him. When he had exchanged greetings with the storekeeper and leant on the counter chatting for a minute or two, as if he had nothing to do but enjoy the dimness of the interior, he would stir with a good-humoured sigh: ‘I’d better show you what I’ve got. It’s a shame to drag such lovely stuff about in this dust. Phillip!’ – his face loomed in the doorway a moment – ‘get a move on there.’

  So long as it was not raining, Phillip kept one elbow on the rolled-down window, the long forearm reaching up to where his slender hand, shaded like the coat of some rare animal from tea-rose pink on the palm to dark matt brown on the back, appeared to support the car’s gleaming roof like a caryatid. The hand would withdraw, he would swing out of the car on to his feet, he would carry into the store the cardboard boxes, suitcases, and, if the store carried what Hirsch called ‘high-class goods’ as well, the special stand of men’s suits hanging on a rail that was made to fit into the back of the car. Then he would saunter out into the street again, giving his tall shoulders a cat’s pleasurable movement under fur – a movement that conveyed to him the excellent drape of his jacket. He would take cigarettes out of his pocket and lean, smoking, against the car’s warm flank.

  Sometimes he held court; like Hirsch, he had become well known on the regular routes. The country people were not exactly shy of him and his kind, but his clothes and his air of city knowhow imposed a certain admiring constraint on them, even if, as in the case of some of the older men and women, they disapproved of the city and the aping of the white man’s ways. He was not above playing a game of mora-baraba , an ancient African kind of draughts, with the blacks from the grain and feed store in a dorp on the Free State run. Hirsch was always a long time in the general store next door, and, meanwhile, Phillip pulled up the perfect creases of his trousers and squatted over the lines of the board drawn with a stone in the dust, ready to show them that you couldn’t beat a chap who had got his training in the big lunch-hour games that are played every day outside the wholesale houses in Johannesburg. At one or two garages, where the petrol attendants in foam-rubber baseball caps given by Shell had picked up a lick of passing sophistication, he sometimes got a poker game. The first time his boss, Hirsch, discovered him at this (Phillip had overestimated the time Hirsch would spend over the quick hand of Klabberyas he was obliged to take, in the way of business, with a local storekeeper), Hirsch’s anger at being kept waiting vanished in a kind of amused and grudging pride. ‘You’re a big fella, now, eh, Phillip? I’ve made a man of you. When you came to me you were a real piccanin. Now you’ve been around so much, you’re taking the boys’ money off them on the road. Did you win?’

  ‘Ah, no, sir,’ Phillip suddenly lied, with a grin.

  ‘Ah-h-h, what’s the matter with you? You didn’t win?’ For a moment Hirsch looked almost as if he were about to give him a few tips. After that, he always passed his worn packs of cards on to his boy.

  And Phillip learned, as time went by, to say, ‘I don’t like the sound of the engine, boss. There’s something loose there. I’m going to get underneath and have a look while I’m down at the garage taking petrol.’

  It was true that Hirsch had taught his boy everything the boy knew, although the years of silence between them in the car had never been broken by conversation or an exchange of ideas. Hirsch was one of those pale, plump, freckled Jews, with pale blue eyes, a thick snub nose and the remains of curly blond hair that had begun to fall out before he was twenty. A number of his best stories depended for their denouement on the fact that somebody or other had not realised that he was a Jew. His pride in this belief that nobody would take him for one was not conventionally anti-Semitic, but based on the reasoning that it was a matter of pride, on the part of the Jewish people, that they could count him among them while he was fitted by nature with the distinguishing characteristics of a more privileged race. Another of his advantages was that he spoke Afrikaans as fluently and idiomatically as any Afrikaner. This, as his boy had heard him explain time and again to English-speaking people, was essential, because, low and ignorant as these back-veld Afrikaners were – hardly better than the natives, most of them – they knew that they had their government up there in power now, and they wouldn’t buy a sixpenny line from you if you spoke the language of the rooineks – the red-neck English.

  With the Jewish shopkeepers, he showed that he was quite at home, because, as Phillip, unpacking the sample range, had overheard him admit a thousand times, he was Jewish born and bred – why, his mother’s brother was a rabbi – even though he knew he didn’t look it for a minute. Many of these shops were husband-and-wife affairs, and Hirsch knew how to make himself pleasant to the wives as well. In his chaff with them, the phrases ‘the old country’ and ‘my father, God rest his soul’ were recurrent. There was also an earnest conversation that began: ‘If you want to meet a character, I wish you could see my mother. What a spirit. She’s seventy-five, she’s got sugar and she’s just been operated for cataract, but I’m telling you, there’s more go in her than—’

  Every now and then there would be a store with a daughter, as well: not very young, not very beautiful, a worry to the mother who stood with her hands folded under her apron, hoping the girl would slim down and make the best of herself, and to the father, who wasn’t getting any younger and would like to see her settled. Hirsch had an opening for this subject, too, tested and tried. ‘Not much life for a girl in a place like this, eh? It’s a pity. But some of the town girls are such rubbish, perhaps it’s better to marry some nice girl from the country. Such rubbish – the Jewish girls, too; oh, yes, they’re just as bad as the rest these days. I wouldn’t mind settling down with a decent girl who hasn’t run around so much. If she’s not so smart, if she doesn’t get herself up like a film star, well, isn’t it better?’

  Phillip thought that his boss was married – in some places, at any rate, he talked about ‘the wife’ – but perhaps it was only that he had once been married, and, anyway, what was the difference when you were on the road? The fat, ugly white girl at the store went and hid herself among the biscuit tins, the mother, half daring to hope, became vivacious by proxy, and the father suddenly began to talk to the traveller intimately about business affairs.

  Phillip found he could make the same kind of stir among country blacks. Hirsch had a permit to enter certain African reserves in his rounds, and there, in the humble little shops owned by Africans – shanties, with the inevitable man at work on a treadle sewing machine outside – he used his boy to do business with them in their own lingo. The
boy wasn’t half bad at it, either. He caught on so quick, he was often the one to suggest that a line that was unpopular in the white dorps could be got rid of in the reserves. He would palm off the stuff like a real showman.

  ‘They can be glad to get anything, boss,’ he said, with a grin. ‘They can’t take a bus to town and look in the shops.’ In spite of his city clothes and his signet ring and all, the boy was exactly as simple as they were, underneath, and he got on with them like a house on fire. Many’s the time some old woman or little kid came running up to the car when it was all packed to go on again and gave him a few eggs or a couple of roasted mealies in a bit of newspaper.

  Early on in his job driving for Hirsch, Phillip had run into a calf; it did not stir on the deserted red-earth road between walls of mealie fields that creaked in a breeze. ‘Go on,’ said his boss, with the authority of one who knows what he is doing, who has learned in a hard school. ‘Go on, it’s dead, there’s nothing to do.’ The young man hesitated, appalled by the soft thump of the impact with which he had given his first death-dealing blow. ‘Go on. There could have been a terrible accident. We could have turned over. These farmers should be prosecuted, the way they don’t look after the cattle.’

  Phillip reversed quickly, avoided the body in a wide curve and drove on. That was what made life on the road; whatever it was, soft touch or hard going, lie or truth, it was left behind. By the time you came by again in a month or two months, things had changed, forgotten and forgiven, and whatever you got yourself into this time, you had always the secret assurance that there would be another breathing space before you could be got at again.

  Phillip had married after he had been travelling with Hirsch for a couple of years; the girl had had a baby by him earlier, but they had waited, as Africans sometimes do, until he could get a house for her before they actually got married. They had two more children, and he kept them pretty well – he wasn’t too badly paid, and of course he could get things wholesale, like the stove for the house. But up Piet Retief way, on one of the routes they took every month, there was a girl he had been sleeping with regularly for years. She swept up the hair cuttings in the local barbershop, where Hirsch sometimes went for a trim if he hadn’t had a chance over the weekend in Johannesburg. That was how Phillip had met her; he was waiting in the car for Hirsch one day, and the girl came out to sweep the step at the shop’s entrance. ‘Hi, wena sisi. I wish you would come and sweep my house for me,’ he called out drowsily.