Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  The lawyer came back early from his offices because the courts were not sitting although the official celebration holiday was not until next day. He described to his wife the rally before the Town Hall, which he had watched from the office-building balcony. One of the guerrilla leaders (not the most important; he on whose head the biggest price had been laid would not venture so soon and deep into the territory so newly won) had spoken for two hours from the balcony of the Town Hall. ‘Brilliant. Their jaws dropped. Brilliant. They’ve never heard anything on that level: precise, reasoned – none of them would ever have believed it possible, out of the bush. You should have seen de Poorteer’s face. He’d like to be able to get up and open his mouth like that. And be listened to like that . . .’ The Governor’s handicap did not even bring the sympathy accorded to a stammer; he paused and gulped between words. The blacks had always used a portmanteau name for him that meant the-crane-who-is-trying-to-swallow-the-bullfrog.

  One of the members of the black underground organisation that could now come out in brass-band support of the freedom fighters had recognised the lawyer across from the official balcony and given him the freedom fighters’ salute. The lawyer joked about it, miming, full of pride. ‘You should have been there – should have seen him, up there in the official party. I told you – really – you ought to have come to town with me this morning.’

  ‘And what did you do?’ She wanted to assemble all details.

  ‘Oh I gave the salute in return, chaps in the street saluted me . . . everybody was doing it. It was marvellous. And the police standing by; just to think, last month – only last week – you’d have been arrested.’

  ‘Like thumbing your nose at them,’ she said, smiling.

  ‘Did anything go on around here?’

  ‘Muchanga was afraid to go out all day. He wouldn’t even run up to the post office for me!’ Their servant had come to them many years ago, from service in the house of her father, a colonial official in the Treasury.

  ‘But there was no excitement?’

  She told him: ‘The soldiers and some freedom fighters mingled outside the barracks. I got caught for a minute or two. They were dancing about; you couldn’t get through. All very good-natured. – Oh, I sent the cable.’

  An accolade, one side a white cheek, the other a black. The white one she kissed on the left cheek, the black one on the right cheek, as if these were two sides of one face.

  That vision, version, was like a poster; the sort of thing that was soon peeling off dirty shopfronts and bus shelters while the months of wrangling talks preliminary to the takeover by the black government went by.

  To begin with, the cheek was not white but pale or rather sallow, the poor boy’s pallor of winter in Europe (that draft must have only just arrived and not yet seen service) with homesick pimples sliced off by the discipline of an army razor. And the cheek was not black but opaque peat-dark, waxed with sweat round the plump contours of the nostril. As if she could return to the moment again, she saw what she had not consciously noted: there had been a narrow pink strip in the darkness near the ear, the sort of tender stripe of healed flesh revealed when a scab is nicked off a little before it is ripe. The scab must have come away that morning: the young man picked at it in the troop carrier or truck (whatever it was the freedom fighters had; the colony had been told for years that they were supplied by the Chinese and Russians indiscriminately) on the way to enter the capital in triumph.

  According to newspaper reports, the day would have ended for the two young soldiers in drunkenness and whoring. She was, apparently, not yet too old to belong to the soldier’s embrace of all that a landmine in the bush might have exploded for ever. That was one version of the incident. Another: the opportunity taken by a woman not young enough to be clasped in the arms of the one who (same newspaper, while the war was on, expressing the fears of the colonists for their women) would be expected to rape her.

  She considered this version.

  She had not kissed on the mouth, she had not sought anonymous lips and tongues in the licence of festival. Yet she had kissed. Watching herself again, she knew that. She had – God knows why – kissed them on either cheek, his left, his right. It was deliberate, if a swift impulse: she had distinctly made the move.

  She did not tell what happened not because her husband would suspect licence in her, but because he would see her – born and brought up in the country as the daughter of an enlightened white colonial official, married to a white liberal lawyer well known for his defence of blacks in political trials – as giving free expression to liberal principles.

  She had not told, she did not know what had happened.

  She thought of a time long ago when a school camp had gone to the sea and immediately on arrival everyone had run down to the beach from the train, tripping and tearing over sand dunes of wild fig, aghast with ecstatic shock at the meeting with the water.

  De Poorteer was recalled and the lawyer remarked to one of their black friends, ‘The crane has choked on the bullfrog. I hear that’s what they’re saying in the Quarter.’

  The priest who came from the black slum that had always been known simply by that anonymous term did not respond with any sort of glee. His reserve implied it was easy to celebrate; there were people who ‘shouted freedom too loud all of a sudden’.

  The lawyer and his wife understood: Father Mulumbua was one who had shouted freedom when it was dangerous to do so, and gone to prison several times for it, while certain people, now on the Interim Council set up to run the country until the new government took over, had kept silent. He named a few, but reluctantly. Enough to confirm their own suspicions – men who perhaps had made some deal with the colonial power to place its interests first, no matter what sort of government might emerge from the new constitution? Yet when the couple plunged into discussion their friend left them talking to each other while he drank his beer and gazed, frowning as if at a headache or because the sunset light hurt his eyes behind his spectacles, round her huge-leaved tropical plants that bowered the terrace in cool humidity.

  They had always been rather proud of their friendship with him, this man in a cassock who wore a clenched fist carved of local ebony as well as a silver cross round his neck. His black face was habitually stern – a high seriousness balanced by sudden splurting laughter when they used to tease him over the fist – but never inattentively ill at ease.

  ‘What was the matter?’ She answered herself; ‘I had the feeling he didn’t want to come here.’ She was using a paper handkerchief dipped in gin to wipe greenfly off the back of a pale new leaf that had shaken itself from its folds like a cut-out paper lantern.

  ‘Good lord, he’s been here hundreds of times.’

  ‘Before, yes.’

  What things were they saying?

  With the shouting in the street and the swaying of the crowd, the sweet powerful presence that confused the senses so that sound, sight, stink (sweat, cheap soap) ran into one tremendous sensation, she could not make out words that came so easily.

  Not even what she herself must have said.

  A few wealthy white men who had been boastful in their support of the colonial war and knew they would be marked down by the blacks as arch exploiters, left at once. Good riddance, as the lawyer and his wife remarked. Many ordinary white people who had lived contentedly, without questioning its actions, under the colonial government, now expressed an enthusiastic intention to help build a nation, as the newspapers put it. The lawyer’s wife’s neighbourhood butcher was one. ‘I don’t mind blacks.’ He was expansive with her, in his shop that he had occupied for twelve years on a licence available only to white people. ‘Makes no difference to me who you are so long as you’re honest.’ Next to a chart showing a beast mapped according to the cuts of meat it provided, he had hung a picture of the most important leader of the freedom fighters, expected to be first President. People like the butcher turned out with their babies clutching pennants when the leader drove through
the town from the airport.

  There were incidents (newspaper euphemism again) in the Quarter. It was to be expected. Political factions, tribally based, who had not fought the war, wanted to share power with the freedom fighters’ party. Muchanga no longer went down to the Quarter on his day off. His friends came to see him and sat privately on their hunkers near the garden compost heap. The ugly mansions of the rich who had fled stood empty on the bluff above the sea, but it was said they would make money out of them yet – they would be bought as ambassadorial residences when independence came, and with it many black and yellow diplomats. Zealots who claimed they belonged to the party burned shops and houses of the poorer whites who lived, as the lawyer said, ‘in the inevitable echelon of colonial society’, closest to the Quarter. A house in the lawyer’s street was noticed by his wife to be accommodating what was certainly one of those families, in the outhouses; green nylon curtains had appeared at the garage window, she reported. The suburb was pleasantly overgrown and well-to-do; no one rich, just white professional people and professors from the university. The barracks was empty now, except for an old man with a stump and a police uniform stripped of insignia, a friend of Muchanga, it turned out, who sat on a beer crate at the gates. He had lost his job as night watchman when one of the rich people went away, and was glad to have work.

  The street had been perfectly quiet; except for that first day.

  The fingernails she sometimes still saw clearly were bitten down until embedded in a thin line of dirt all round, in the pink blunt fingers. The thumb and thick fingertips were turned back coarsely even while grasping her. Such hands had never been allowed to take possession. They were permanently raw, so young, from unloading coal, digging potatoes from the frozen northern hemisphere, washing hotel dishes. He had not been killed, and now that day of the ceasefire was over he would be delivered back across the sea to the docks, the stony farm, the scullery of the grand hotel. He would have to do anything he could get. There was unemployment in Europe where he had returned, the army didn’t need all the young men any more.

  A great friend of the lawyer and his wife, Chipande, was coming home from exile. They heard over the radio he was expected, accompanying the future President as confidential secretary, and they waited to hear from him.

  The lawyer put up his feet on the empty chair where the priest had sat, shifting it to a comfortable position by hooking his toes, free in sandals, through the slats. ‘Imagine, Chipande!’ Chipande had been almost a protégé – but they didn’t like the term, it smacked of patronage. Tall, cocky, casual Chipande, a boy from the slummiest part of the Quarter, was recommended by the White Fathers’ Mission (was it by Father Mulumbua himself? – the lawyer thought so, his wife was not sure they remembered correctly). A bright kid who wanted to be articled to a lawyer. That was asking a lot, in those days – nine years ago. He never finished his apprenticeship because while he and his employer were soon close friends, and the kid picked up political theories from the books in the house he made free of, he became so involved in politics that he had to skip the country one jump ahead of a detention order signed by the crane-who-was-trying-to-swallow-the-bullfrog.

  After two weeks, the lawyer phoned the offices the guerrilla-movement-become-party had set up openly in the town but apparently Chipande had an office in the former colonial secretariat. There he had a secretary of his own; he wasn’t easy to reach. The lawyer left a message. The lawyer and his wife saw from the newspaper pictures he hadn’t changed much: he had a beard and had adopted the Muslim cap favoured by political circles in exile on the East Coast.

  He did come to the house eventually. He had the distracted, insistent friendliness of one who has no time to re-establish intimacy; it must be taken as read. And it must not be displayed. When he remarked on a shortage of accommodation for exiles now become officials, and the lawyer said the house was far too big for two people, he was welcome to move in and regard a self-contained part of it as his private living quarters, he did not answer but went on talking generalities.

  The lawyer’s wife mentioned Father Mulumbua, whom they had not seen since just after the ceasefire. The lawyer added, ‘There’s obviously some sort of big struggle going on, he’s fighting for his political life there in the Quarter.’

  ‘Again,’ she said, drawing them into a reminder of what had only just become their past.

  But Chipande was restlessly following with his gaze the movements of old Muchanga, dragging the hose from plant to plant, careless of the spray; ‘You remember who this is, Muchanga?’ she had said when the visitor arrived, yet although the old man had given, in their own language, the sort of respectful greeting even an elder gives a young man whose clothes and bearing denote rank and authority, he was not in any way overwhelmed nor enthusiastic – perhaps he secretly supported one of the rival factions?

  The lawyer spoke of the latest whites to leave the country – people who had got themselves quickly involved in the sort of currency swindle that draws more outrage than any other kind of crime, in a new state fearing the flight of capital: ‘Let them go, let them go. Good riddance.’ And he turned to talk of other things – there were so many more important questions to occupy the attention of the three old friends.

  But Chipande couldn’t stay. Chipande could not stay for supper; his beautiful long velvety black hands with their pale lining (as she thought of the palms) hung impatiently between his knees while he sat forward in the chair, explaining, adamant against persuasion. He should not have been there, even now; he had official business waiting, sometimes he drafted correspondence until one or two in the morning. The lawyer remarked how there hadn’t been a proper chance to talk; he wanted to discuss those fellows in the Interim Council Mulumbua was so warily distrustful of – what did Chipande know?

  Chipande, already on his feet, said something dismissing and very slightly disparaging, not about the Council members but of Mulumbua – a reference to his connection with the Jesuit missionaries as an influence that ‘comes through’. ‘But I must make a note to see him sometime.’

  It seemed that even black men who presented a threat to the party could be discussed only among black men themselves, now. Chipande put an arm round each of his friends as for the brief official moment of a photograph, left them; he who used to sprawl on the couch arguing half the night before dossing down in the lawyer’s pyjamas. ‘As soon as I’m settled I’ll contact you. You’ll be around, ay?’

  ‘Oh we’ll be around.’ The lawyer laughed, referring, for his part, to those who were no longer. ‘Glad to see you’re not driving a Mercedes!’ he called with reassured affection at the sight of Chipande getting into a modest car. How many times, in the old days, had they agreed on the necessity for African leaders to live simply when they came to power!

  On the terrace to which he turned back, Muchanga was doing something extraordinary – wetting a dirty rag with Gilbey’s. It was supposed to be his day off, anyway; why was he messing about with the plants when one wanted peace to talk undisturbed?

  ‘Is those thing again, those thing is killing the leaves.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, he could use methylated for that! Any kind of alcohol will do! Why don’t you get him some?’

  There were shortages of one kind and another in the country, and gin happened to be something in short supply.

  Whatever the hand had done in the bush had not coarsened it. It, too, was suede-black, and elegant. The pale lining was hidden against her own skin where the hand grasped her left elbow. Strangely, black does not show toil – she remarked this as one remarks the quality of a fabric. The hand was not as long but as distinguished by beauty as Chipande’s. The watch a fine piece of equipment for a fighter. There was something next to it, in fact looped over the strap by the angle of the wrist as the hand grasped. A bit of thong with a few beads knotted where it was joined as a bracelet. Or amulet. Their babies wore such things; often their first and only garment. Grandmothers or mothers attached it as prote
ction. It had worked; he was alive at ceasefire. Some had been too deep in the bush to know, and had been killed after the fighting was over. He had pumped his head wildly and laughingly at whatever it was she – they – had been babbling.

  The lawyer had more free time than he’d ever remembered. So many of his clients had left; he was deputed to collect their rents and pay their taxes for them, in the hope that their property wasn’t going to be confiscated – there had been alarmist rumours among such people since the day of the ceasefire. But without the rich whites there was little litigation over possessions, whether in the form of the children of dissolved marriages or the houses and cars claimed by divorced wives. The Africans had their own ways of resolving such redistribution of goods. And a gathering of elders under a tree was sufficient to settle a dispute over boundaries or argue for and against the guilt of a woman accused of adultery. He had had a message, in a roundabout way, that he might be asked to be consultant on constitutional law to the party, but nothing seemed to come of it. He took home with him the proposals for the draft constitution he had managed to get hold of. He spent whole afternoons in his study making notes for counter- or improved proposals he thought he would send to Chipande or one of the other people he knew in high positions: every time he glanced up, there through his open windows was Muchanga’s little company at the bottom of the garden. Once, when he saw they had straggled off, he wandered down himself to clear his head (he got drowsy, as he never did when he used to work twelve hours a day at the office). They ate dried shrimps, from the market: that’s what they were doing! The ground was full of bitten-off heads and black eyes on stalks.