Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  For a long time now she had worn a signet ring, nine carats, engraved with his first name and hers; Hirsch did not carry anything in the jewellery line, but of course Phillip, in the fraternity of the road, knew the boys of other travellers who did. She was a plump, hysterical little thing, with very large eyes that could accommodate unshed tears for minutes on end, and – something unusual for black women – a faint moustache outlining her top lip. She would have been a shrew to live with, but it was pleasant to see how she awaited him every month with coy, bridling passion. When she pressed him to settle the date when they might marry, he filched some minor item from the extensive women’s range that Hirsch carried, and that kept her quiet until next time. Phillip did not consider this as stealing, but as part of the running expenses of the road to which he was entitled, and he was trustworthy with his boss’s money or goods in all other circumstances.

  In fact, if he had known it and if Hirsch had known it, his filching fell below the margin for dishonesty that Hirsch, in his reckoning of the running expenses of the road, allowed: ‘They all steal, what’s the good of worrying about it? You change one, you get a worse thief, that’s all.’ It was one of Hirsch’s maxims in the philosophy of the road.

  The morning they left on the Bechuanaland run, Hirsch looked up from the newspaper and said to his boy, ‘You’ve got your passbook, eh?’ There was the slightest emphasis on the ‘you’ve’, an emphasis confident rather than questioning. Hirsch was well aware that, although the blurred front-page picture before him showed black faces open-mouthed, black hands flung up triumphant around a bonfire of passbooks, Phillip was not the type to look for trouble.

  ‘Yes, sir, I’ve got it,’ said Phillip, overtaking, as the traffic lights changed, a row of cars driven by white men; he had driven so much and so well that there was a certain beauty in his performance – he might have been skiing, or jumping hurdles.

  Hirsch went back to the paper; there was nothing in it but reports of this anti-pass campaign that the natives had started up. He read them all with a deep distrust of the amorphous threat that he thought of as ‘trouble’, taking on any particular form. Trouble was always there, hanging over every human head, of course; it was only when it drew near, ‘came down’, that it took on a specific guise: illness, a drop in business, the blacks wanting to live like white men. Anyway, he himself had nothing to worry about: his boy knew his job, and he knew he must have his pass on him in case, in a routine demand in the streets of any of the villages they passed through, a policeman should ask him to show it.

  Phillip was not worried, either. When the men in the location came to the door to urge him to destroy his pass, he was away on the road, and only his wife was at home to assure them that he had done so; when some policeman in a dorp stopped him to see it, there it was, in the inner pocket of the rayon lining of his jacket. And one day, when this campaign or another was successful, he would never need to carry it again.

  At every call they made on that trip, people were eager for news of what was happening in Johannesburg. Old barefoot men in the dignity of battered hats came from the yards behind the stores, trembling with dread and wild hope. Was it true that so many people were burning their passes that the police couldn’t arrest them all? Was it true that in such-and-such a location people had gone to the police station and left passes in a pile in front of the door? Was it the wild young men who called themselves Africanists who were doing this? Or did Congress want it, did the old Chief, Luthuli, call for it too?

  ‘We are going to free you all of the pass,’ Phillip found himself declaiming. Children, hanging about, gave the Congress raised-thumb salute. ‘The white man won’t bend our backs like yours, old man.’ They could see for themselves how much he had already taken from the white man, wearing the same clothes as the white man, driving the white man’s big car – an emissary from the knowledgeable, political world of the city, where black men were learning to be masters. Even Hirsch’s cry, ‘Phillip, get a move on there!’, came as an insignificant interruption, a relic of the present almost become the past.

  Over the border, in the British protectorate, Bechuanaland, the interest was just as high. Phillip found it remarkably easy to talk to the little groups of men who approached him in the luxurious dust that surrounded village buildings, the kitchen boys who gathered in country hotel yards where cats fought beside glittering mounds of empty beer bottles. ‘We are going to see that this is the end of the pass. The struggle for freedom – the white man won’t stand on our backs – ’

  It was a long, hot trip. Hirsch, pale and exhausted, dozed and twitched in his sleep between one dorp and the next. For the last few months he had been putting pills instead of sugar into his tea, and he no longer drank the endless bottles of lemonade and ginger beer that he had sent the boy to buy at every stop for as long as he could remember. There was a strange, sweetish smell that seemed to follow Hirsch around these days; it settled in the car on that long trip and was there even when Hirsch wasn’t; but Phillip, who, like most travellers’ boys, slept in the car at night, soon got used to it.

  They went as far as Francistown, where, all day, while they were in and out of the long line of stores facing the railway station, a truckload of Herero women from further north in the Kalahari Desert sat beside the road in their Victorian dress, turbaned, unsmiling, stiff and voluminous, like a row of tea cosies. The travelling salesmen did not go on to Rhodesia. From Francistown they turned back for Johannesburg, with a stop overnight at Palapye Road, so that they could make a detour to Serowe, an African town of round mud houses, dark euphorbia hedges and tinkling goat bells, where the deposed chief and his English wife lived on a hill in a large house with many bathrooms, but there was no hotel. The hotel in Palapye Road was a fly-screened box on the railway station, and Hirsch spent a bad night amid the huffing and blowing of trains taking water and the bursts of stamping – a gigantic Spanish dance – of shunting trains.

  They left for home early on Friday morning. By half-past five in the afternoon they were flying along towards the outskirts of Johannesburg, with the weary heat of the day blowing out of the windows in whiffs of high land and the sweat suddenly deliciously cool on their hands and foreheads. The row of suits on the rack behind them slid obediently down and up again with each rise and dip accomplished in the turn of the road. The usual landmarks, all in their places, passed unlooked at: straggling, small-enterprise factories, a brickfield, a chicken farm, the rose nursery with the toy Dutch windmill, various gatherings of low, patchy huts and sagging houses – small locations where the blacks who worked round about lived. At one point, the road closely skirted one of these places; the children would wave and shout from where they played in the dirt. Today, quite suddenly, a shower of stones came from them. For a moment Hirsch truly thought that he had become aware of a sudden summer hailstorm; he was always so totally enclosed by the car it would not have been unusual for him not to have noticed a storm rising. He put his hand on the handle that raised the window; instantly, a sharp grey chip pitted the fold of flesh between thumb and first finger.

  ‘Drive on,’ he yelled, putting the blood to his mouth. ‘Drive on!’ But his boy, Phillip, had at the same moment seen what they had blundered into. Fifty yards ahead a labouring green bus, its windows, under flapping canvas, crammed with black heads, had lurched to a stop. It appeared to burst as people jumped out at doors and windows; from the houses, a jagged rush of more people met them and spread around the bus over the road.

  Phillip stopped the car so fiercely that Hirsch was nearly pitched through the windscreen. With a roar the car reversed, swinging off the road sideways on to the veld, and then swung wildly around on to the road again, facing where it had come from. The steering wheel spun in the ferocious, urgent skill of the pink-and-brown hands. Hirsch understood and anxiously trusted; at the feel of the car righting itself, a grin broke through in his boy’s face.

  But as Phillip’s suede shoe was coming down on the accelerator, a blac
k hand in a greasy, buttonless coat sleeve seized his arm through the window, and the car rocked with the weight of the bodies that flung and clung against it. When the engine stalled, there was quiet; the hand let go of Phillip’s arm. The men and women around the car were murmuring to themselves, pausing for breath; their power and indecision gave Hirsch the strongest feeling he had ever had in his life, a sheer, pure cleavage of terror that, as he fell apart, exposed – tiny kernel, his only defence, his only hope, his only truth – the will to live. ‘You talk to them,’ he whispered, rapping it out, confidential, desperately confident. ‘You tell them – one of their own people, what can they want with you? Make it right. Let them take the stuff. Anything, for God’s sake. You understand me? Speak to them.’

  ‘They can’t want nothing with this car,’ Phillip was saying loudly and in a superior tone. ‘This car is not the government.’

  But a woman’s shrill demand came again and again, and apparently it was to have them out. ‘Get out, come on, get out,’ came threateningly, in English, at Hirsch’s window, and at his boy’s side a heated, fast-breathing exchange in their own language.

  Phillip’s voice was injured, protesting, and angry. ‘What do you want to stop us for? We’re going home from a week selling on the road. Any harm in that? I work for him, and I’m driving back to Jo’burg. Come on now, clear off. I’m a Congress man myself—’

  A thin woman broke the hearing with a derisive sound like a shake of castanets at the back of her tongue. ‘Congress! Everybody can say. Why you’re working?’

  And a man in a sweatshirt, with a knitted woollen cap on his head, shouted, ‘Stay-at-home. Nobody but traitors work today. What are you driving the white man for?’

  ‘I’ve just told you, man, I’ve been away a week in Bechuanaland. I must get home somehow, mustn’t I? Finish this, man, let us get on, I tell you.’

  They made Hirsch and his boy get out of the car, but Hirsch, watching and listening to the explosive vehemence between his boy and the crowd, clung to the edge of a desperate, icy confidence: the boy was explaining to them – one of their own people. They did not actually hold Hirsch, but they stood around him, men whose nostrils moved in and out as they breathed; big-breasted warriors from the washtub who looked at him, spoke together, and spat; even children, who filled up the spaces between the legs so that the stirring human press that surrounded him was solid and all alive. ‘Tell them, can’t you?’ he kept appealing, encouragingly.

  ‘Where’s your pass?’

  ‘His pass, his pass!’ the women began to yell.

  ‘Where’s your pass?’ the man who had caught Phillip through the car window screamed in his face.

  And he yelled back, too quickly, ‘I’ve burned it! It’s burned! I’ve finished with the pass!’

  The women began to pull at his clothes. The men might have let him go, but the women set upon his fine city clothes as if he were an effigy. They tore and poked and snatched, and there – perhaps they had not really been looking for it or expected it – at once, fell the passbook. One of them ran off with it through the crowd, yelling and holding it high and hitting herself on the breast with it. People began to fight over it, like a souvenir. ‘Burn! Burn!’ ‘Kill him!’

  Somebody gave Phillip a felling blow aimed for the back of his neck, but whoever it was was too short to reach the target and the blow caught him on the shoulder blade instead.

  ‘O my God, tell them, tell them, your own people!’ Hirsch was shouting angrily. With a perfect, hypnotising swiftness – the moment of survival, when the buck outleaps the arc of its own strength past the lion’s jaws – his boy was in the car, and with a shuddering rush of power, shaking the men off as they came, crushing someone’s foot as the tyres scudded madly, drove on.

  ‘Come back!’ Hirsch’s voice, although he could not hear it, swelled so thick in his throat it almost choked him. ‘Come back, I tell you!’ Beside him and around him, the crowd ran. Their mouths were wide, and he did not know for whom they were clamouring – himself or the boy.

  A Chip of Glass Ruby

  When the duplicating machine was brought into the house, Bamjee said, ‘Isn’t it enough that you’ve got the Indians’ troubles on your back?’ Mrs Bamjee said, with a smile that showed the gap of a missing tooth but was confident all the same, ‘What’s the difference, Yusuf? – we’ve all got the same troubles.’

  ‘Don’t tell me that. We don’t have to carry passes; let the natives protest against passes on their own, there are millions of them. Let them go ahead with it.’

  The nine Bamjee and Pahad children were present at this exchange as they were always; in the small house that held them all there was no room for privacy for the discussion of matters they were too young to hear, and so they had never been too young to hear anything. Only their sister and half-sister, Girlie, was missing; she was the eldest, and married. The children looked expectantly, unalarmed and interested, at Bamjee, who had neither left the dining room nor settled down again to the task of rolling his own cigarettes, which had been interrupted by the arrival of the duplicator. He looked at the thing that had come hidden in a wash-basket and conveyed in a black man’s taxi, and the children turned on it, too, their black eyes surrounded by thick lashes like those still, open flowers with hairy tentacles that close on whatever touches them.

  ‘A fine thing to have on the dining-room table,’ was all he said at last. They smelled the machine among them; a smell of cold black grease. He went out, heavily on tiptoe, in his troubled way.

  ‘It’s going to go nicely on the sideboard!’ Mrs Bamjee was busy making a place by removing the two pink glass vases filled with plastic carnations and the hand-painted velvet runner with the picture of the Taj Mahal.

  After supper she began to run off leaflets on the machine. The family lived in the dining room – the three other rooms in the house were full of beds – and they were all there. The older children shared a bottle of ink while they did their homework, and the two little ones pushed a couple of empty milk bottles in and out the legs of chairs. The three-year-old fell asleep and was carted away by one of the girls. They all drifted off to bed eventually; Bamjee himself went before the older children – he was a fruit and vegetable hawker and was up at half past four every morning to get to the market by five.

  ‘Not long now,’ said Mrs Bamjee. The older children looked up and smiled at him. He turned his back on her. She still wore the traditional clothing of a Muslim woman, and her body, which was scraggy and unimportant as a dress on a peg when it was not host to a child, was wrapped in the trailing rags of a cheap sari, and her thin black plait was greased. When she was a girl, in the Transvaal town where they lived still, her mother fixed a chip of glass ruby in her nostril; but she had abandoned that adornment as too old-style, even for her, long ago.

  She was up until long after midnight, turning out leaflets. She did it as if she might have been pounding chillies.

  Bamjee did not have to ask what the leaflets were. He had read the papers. All the past week Africans had been destroying their passes and then presenting themselves for arrest. Their leaders were jailed on charges of incitement, campaign offices were raided – someone must be helping the few minor leaders who were left to keep the campaign going without offices or equipment. What was it the leaflets would say – ‘Don’t go to work tomorrow’, ‘Day of Protest’, ‘Burn Your Pass for Freedom’? He didn’t want to see.

  He was used to coming home and finding his wife sitting at the dining-room table deep in discussion with strangers or people whose names were familiar by repute. Some were prominent Indians, like the lawyer, Dr Abdul Mohammed Khan, or the big businessman, Mr Moonsamy Patel, and he was flattered, in a suspicious way, to meet them in his house. As he came home from work next day he met Dr Khan coming out of the house, and Dr Khan – a highly educated man – said to him, ‘A wonderful woman’. But Bamjee had never caught his wife out in any presumption; she behaved properly, as any Muslim woman should, and once
her business with such gentlemen was over would never, for instance, have sat down to eat with them.

  He found her now back in the kitchen, setting about the preparation of dinner and carrying on a conversation on several different wavelengths with the children. ‘It’s really a shame if you’re tired of lentils, Jimmy, because that’s what you’re getting – Amina, hurry up, get a pot of water going – don’t worry, I’ll mend that in a minute, just bring the yellow cotton, and there’s a needle in the cigarette box on the sideboard.’

  ‘Was that Dr Khan leaving?’ said Bamjee.

  ‘Yes, there’s going to be a stay-at-home on Monday. Desai’s ill, and he’s got to get the word around by himself. Bob Jali was up all last night printing leaflets, but he’s gone to have a tooth out.’ She had always treated Bamjee as if it were only a mannerism that made him appear uninterested in politics, the way some woman will persist in interpreting her husband’s bad temper as an endearing gruffness hiding boundless goodwill, and she talked to him of these things just as she passed on to him neighbours’ or family gossip.