Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  His wife smiled. ‘They bring them. Muchanga won’t go near the market since the riot.’

  ‘It’s ridiculous. Who’s going to harm him?’

  There was even a suggestion that the lawyer might apply for a professorship at the university. The chair of the Faculty of Law was vacant, since the students had demanded the expulsion of certain professors engaged during the colonial regime – in particular of the fuddy-duddy (good riddance) who had gathered dust in the Law chair, and the quite decent young man (pity about him) who had had Political Science. But what professor of Political Science could expect to survive both a colonial regime and the revolutionary regime that defeated it? The lawyer and his wife decided that since he might still be appointed in some consultative capacity to the new government it would be better to keep out of the university context, where the students were shouting for Africanisation, and even an appointee with his credentials as a fighter of legal battles for blacks against the colonial regime in the past might not escape their ire.

  Newspapers sent by friends from over the border gave statistics for the number of what they termed ‘refugees’ who were entering the neighbouring country. The papers from outside also featured sensationally the inevitable mistakes and misunderstandings, in a new administration, that led to several foreign businessmen being held for investigation by the new regime. For the last fifteen years of colonial rule, Gulf had been drilling for oil in the territory, and just as inevitably it was certain that all sorts of questionable people, from the point of view of the regime’s determination not to be exploited preferentially, below the open market for the highest bidder in ideological as well as economic terms, would try to gain concessions.

  His wife said, ‘The butcher’s gone.’

  He was home, reading at his desk; he could spend the day more usefully there than at the office, most of the time. She had left after breakfast with her fisherman’s basket that she liked to use for shopping, she wasn’t away twenty minutes. ‘You mean the shop’s closed?’ There was nothing in the basket. She must have turned and come straight home.

  ‘Gone. It’s empty. He’s cleared out over the weekend.’

  She sat down suddenly on the edge of the desk; and after a moment of silence, both laughed shortly, a strange, secret, complicit laugh.

  ‘Why, do you think?’

  ‘Can’t say. He certainly charged, if you wanted a decent cut. But meat’s so hard to get, now; I thought it was worth it – justified.’

  The lawyer raised his eyebrows and pulled down his mouth: ‘Exactly.’ They understood; the man probably knew he was marked to run into trouble for profiteering – he must have been paying through the nose for his supplies on the black market, anyway, didn’t have much choice.

  Shops were being looted by the unemployed and loafers (there had always been a lot of unemployed hanging around for the pickings of the town) who felt the new regime should entitle them to take what they dared not before. Radio and television shops were the most favoured objective for gangs who adopted the freedom fighters’ slogans. Transistor radios were the portable luxuries of street life; the new regime issued solemn warnings, over those same radios, that looting and violence would be firmly dealt with but it was difficult for the police to be everywhere at once. Sometimes their actions became street battles, since the struggle with the looters changed character as supporters of the party’s rival political factions joined in with the thieves against the police. It was necessary to be ready to reverse direction, quickly turning down a side street in detour if one encountered such disturbances while driving around town. There were bodies sometimes; both husband and wife had been fortunate enough not to see any close up, so far. A company of the freedom fighters’ army was brought down from the north and installed in the barracks to supplement the police force; they patrolled the Quarter, mainly. Muchanga’s friend kept his job as gatekeeper although there were armed sentries on guard: the lawyer’s wife found that a light touch to mention in letters to relatives in Europe.

  ‘Where’ll you go now?’

  She slid off the desk and picked up her basket. ‘Supermarket, I suppose. Or turn vegetarian.’ He knew that she left the room quickly, smiling, because she didn’t want him to suggest Muchanga ought to be sent to look for fish in the markets along the wharf in the Quarter. Muchanga was being allowed to indulge in all manner of eccentric refusals; for no reason, unless out of some curious sentiment about her father?

  She avoided walking past the barracks because of the machine guns the young sentries had in place of rifles. Rifles pointed into the air but machine guns pointed to the street at the level of different parts of people’s bodies, short and tall, the backsides of babies slung on mothers’ backs, the round heads of children, her fisherman’s basket – she knew she was getting like the others: what she felt was afraid. She wondered what the butcher and his wife had said to each other. Because he was at least one whom she had known. He had sold the meat she had bought that these women and their babies passing her in the street didn’t have the money to buy.

  It was something quite unexpected and outside their own efforts that decided it. A friend over the border telephoned and offered a place in a lawyers’ firm of highest repute there, and some prestige in the world at large, since the team had defended individuals fighting for freedom of the press and militant churchmen upholding freedom of conscience on political issues. A telephone call; as simple as that. The friend said (and the lawyer did not repeat this even to his wife) they would be proud to have a man of his courage and convictions in the firm. He could be satisfied he would be able to uphold the liberal principles everyone knew he had always stood for; there were many whites, in that country still ruled by a white minority, who deplored the injustices under which their black population suffered, etc., and believed you couldn’t ignore the need for peaceful change, etc.

  His offices presented no problem; something called Africa Seabeds (Formosan Chinese who had gained a concession to ship seaweed and dried shrimps in exchange for rice) took over the lease and the typists. The senior clerks and the current articled clerk (the lawyer had always given a chance to young blacks, long before other people had come round to it – it wasn’t only the secretary to the President who owed his start to him) he managed to get employed by the new Trades Union Council; he still knew a few blacks who remembered the times he had acted for black workers in disputes with the colonial government. The house would just have to stand empty, for the time being. It wasn’t imposing enough to attract an embassy but maybe it would do for a Chargé d’Affaires – it was left in the hands of a half-caste letting agent who was likely to stay put: only whites were allowed in, at the country over the border. Getting money out was going to be much more difficult than disposing of the house. The lawyer would have to keep coming back, so long as this remained practicable, hoping to find a loophole in exchange control regulations.

  She was deputed to engage the movers. In their innocence, they had thought it as easy as that! Every large vehicle, let alone a pantechnicon, was commandeered for months ahead. She had no choice but to grease a palm, although it went against her principles, it was condoning a practice they believed a young black state must stamp out before corruption took hold. He would take his entire legal library, for a start; that was the most important possession, to him. Neither was particularly attached to furniture. She did not know what there was she felt she really could not do without. Except the plants. And that was out of the question. She could not even mention it. She did not want to leave her towering plants, mostly natives of South America and not Africa, she supposed, whose aerial tubes pushed along the terrace brick erect tips extending hourly in the growth of the rainy season, whose great leaves turned shields to the spatter of Muchanga’s hose glancing off in a shower of harmless arrows, whose two-hand-span trunks were smooth and grooved in one sculptural sweep down their length, or carved by the drop of each dead leaf-stem with concave medallions marking the place and building a pattern
at once bold and exquisite. Such things would not travel; they were too big to give away.

  The evening she was beginning to pack the books, the telephone rang in the study. Chipande – and he called her by her name, urgently, commandingly – ‘What is this all about? Is it true, what I hear? Let me just talk to him—’

  ‘Our friend,’ she said, making a long arm, receiver at the end of it, towards her husband.

  ‘But you can’t leave!’ Chipande shouted down the phone. ‘You can’t go! I’m coming round. Now.’

  She went on packing the legal books while Chipande and her husband were shut up together in the living room.

  ‘He cried. You know, he actually cried.’ Her husband stood in the doorway, alone.

  ‘I know – that’s what I’ve always liked so much about them, whatever they do. They feel.’

  The lawyer made a face: there it is, it happened; hard to believe.

  ‘Rushing in here, after nearly a year! I said, but we haven’t seen you, all this time . . . he took no notice. Suddenly he starts pressing me to take the university job, raising all sorts of objections, why not this . . . that. And then he really wept, for a moment.’

  They got on with packing books like builder and mate deftly handling and catching bricks.

  And the morning they were to leave it was all done; twenty-one years of life in that house gone quite easily into one pantechnicon. They were quiet with each other, perhaps out of apprehension of the tedious search of their possessions that would take place at the border; it was said that if you struck over-conscientious or officious freedom fighter patrols they would even make you unload a piano, a refrigerator or washing machine. She had bought Muchanga a hawker’s licence, a hand-cart, and stocks of small commodities. Now that many small shops owned by white shopkeepers had disappeared, there was an opportunity for humble itinerant black traders. Muchanga had lost his fear of the town. He was proud of what she had done for him and she knew he saw himself as a rich merchant; this was the only sort of freedom he understood, after so many years as a servant. But she also knew, and the lawyer sitting beside her in the car knew she knew, that the shortages of the goods Muchanga could sell from his cart, the sugar and soap and matches and pomade and sunglasses, would soon put him out of business. He promised to come back to the house and look after the plants every week; and he stood waving, as he had done every year when they set off on holiday. She did not know what to call out to him as they drove away. The right words would not come again; whatever they were, she left them behind.

  For Dear Life

  Swaying along in the howdah of her belly I make procession up steep streets. The drumming of her heart exalts me; I do not know the multitudes. With my thumb-hookah I pass among them unseen and unseeing behind the dancing scarlet brocades of her blood. From time to time I am lurched to rest. Habituation to the motion causes me to move: as if the hidden presence raps testy impatience. They place their hands to read a sign from where there is no cognition of their existence.

  A wall-eyed twenty-five-year-old Arab with a knitted cap jumps back into the trench in a cheerful bound. Others clamber stockily, with the dazed open mouth of labourers and the scowl of sweat. Their work clothes are cast-off pinstripe pants brought in rumpled bundles from Tunis and Algiers. Closely modelled to their heads and growing low, straight across their foreheads, their kind of hair is a foreign headgear by which they see themselves known even if they do not speak their soft, guttural, prophet’s tongue. One has gold in his mouth, the family fortune crammed into crooked teeth. Another is emaciated as a beggar or wise man, big feet in earth-sculpted boots the only horizontal as his arms fly up with the pick. Eyes starred like clowns’ with floury dust look up from the ditch just at the level where the distortion of the female body lifts a tent of skirt to show the female thighs. She’s a young one. Mending roads and laying sewage pipes through the French resort over more than a year, they have seen her walking with the man who wanted her, in pursuit, hunting her even while he and she walked side by side, with his gilt-buckled waist, his handbag manacled to his wrist, his snakeskin-snug shirt showing sportsman shoulders, his satyr’s curly red hair, thin on top, creeping down the back of his neck and breast-bone, glinting after her along with his eyes and smile.

  Like the other women in this country, she was not for them. She did not nod at them then and the mouth parted now as she’s approaching is not the beginning of the greeting she has for the postman or any village crone. She’s simply panting under her eight-month burden: in there, another foreman, overseer, patron like the one who will come by any minute to make sure they are not idling.

  Here – feel it?

  Concentrate on the drained cappuccino cups spittled with chocolate-flecked foam. The boom of the juke box someone’s set in motion seems to be preventing . . . as if it were a matter of hearing, through the palm!

  Give me your hand—

  A small-change clink as silver bracelets on the older woman’s wrist move with volition surrendered.

  There. There. Lower down, that’s it – now you must be able to.

  But was it not always something impossible to detect from outside . . . So long ago: tapping, plucking (yes, that was much more the way it was) – plucking at one’s flesh from within as fingers fidget pleating cloth. If I were the one, now, you were inside, I should feel you. You would be unmistakable. You would be unlike the children he had or the children I had. You are a girl because he had no girl. His daughter with his stiff-legged walk (heron-legs, I used to say) and my bottom (bobtail, he used to say) and his oval nails and fine white skin behind the ears. You can crack your knee and ankle joints. Tea leaves tinsel the grey of your irises. Like him, like me. You have our face; when we used to see ourselves as a couple in the mirror of a lift that was carrying us clandestinely.

  The doctor says they suck their thumbs in the womb. Sucks its thumb!

  As if the doctor were a colleague the young husband confirms with a nod, gazing assessingly at the majestic mound that rises out of the level of water in the bath. Like many people without a profession he has a magazine-article amateur’s claim to knowledge in many.

  My boy’s been shown what life is all about from when he wasn’t more than an infant in arms. No sweets, look at the state my teeth are in. You’ll finish school whatever happens. That’s all very fine, earning enough to buy yourself a third-hand Porsche ‘C’ ’59 at nineteen but at thirty-four you find yourself selling TV sets on commission, during a recession. No running around the summer streets, twelve years old and ought to be asleep at night. No chasing girls, catching them, squeezing their little breasts on the dark porch of the old church before it was pulled down. Steer clear of married women who keep you in bed, spoilt bitches, while their husbands get on in the world and buy the Panther Westwinds de Ville, modelled after the Bugatti Royal, best car ever made, Onassis had one, and Purdey guns, gold cigarette lighters, camera equipment, boats with every comfort (bar, sauna) – you could even live on board, for instance if you couldn’t get a rent-controlled flat. Great lover, but the silk shirts and real kid boots from Italy don’t last long when you’re hanging around bars looking for work and all you get offered is the dirty jobs the Arabs are here to do. No smoking, either; bad enough that your mother and I mess up our lungs, 20 per cent reduction of life expectancy, they say. You’ll have more sense or I’ll know why. You’ll be lucky. Women love red hair, a well-known sign of virility. You’ll fly first class with free champagne. You’ll fill in forms: ‘Company Director’. You’ll do as I say. If you aren’t given Coca-Cola to taste, you won’t miss it.

  Feel – my belly’s so hard. I’m like a rock.

  She does not know the name, but she is thinking of a geode halved, in a shop window; a cave of crystals, a star cracked open. In there, curved as a bean, the wonder of her body blindly gazes.

  How long to go?

  It is an old woman’s form of greeting. Her stiff dog stands with his front paws on the kitchen window and watches
the heads below that come into view and pass. He lifts his nose slightly, as at a recollection, when a boy clatters from the baker’s to the hotel with a headdress of loaves. Beside the dog the crone looks down at a dome under which sandalled feet show, like the cardboard feet of one of those anthropomorphic balloon toys, and above which a bright, smooth face smiles up at her with the kindly patronage of the young.

  It can’t be long: for her. Every day, when she and the dog manage to get as far as the front step to sit down in a series of very slow movements in the sun at noon, you can count the breaths left.

  He will stand behind a desk in his Immigration Officer’s uniform and stamp how long they can stay and when they must go. He will drive up in his big car that rises and sinks on its soft springs in the dust as a bird settles upon water, and not bother to get out, giving orders through the window to the one among them who understands the language a little better than the others.

  No one will know who you are; not even you.

  Only we, who are forgetting each other, will know who you never were.

  Even possibilities pass.

  I don’t cry and I don’t bleed.

  My daughter wanted for nothing. I bought a Hammond organ on instalments because she’s so musical. (Since she was a little thing.) She could have gone to a good convent although we’re not religious. Right, she wanted a car, I got her a car and she drove around without a licence: I warned her. The boys were crazy for her; her mother talked to her. She looked like eighteen at fourteen with that figure and that beautiful curly red hair. You don’t see anything like it, usually it all comes out of a bottle. I won’t have her making herself cheap. She could go to study at the university or take up beauty culture. There’s money in that. If anyone lays a finger on her—