Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  The emaciated ditch-digger weeps sometimes as he digs. It is on Mondays that the sight occurs among them, when he is suffering from the drink their religion forbids. His brother has committed suicide in Marseilles knowing the sickness of the genitals he had was punishment for offending Allah by going with a white whore.

  It is summer round the empty house in the fields the family left two generations ago. They can’t go back, except to picnic like tourists who bring their cheese and wine and ashamed little caches of toilet paper on to anyone’s property. There’s no electricity and there’s water only in a well. They spray the old vines once a year, and once a year come for the grapes. Cows from neighbouring farms stare from the grass with their calves.

  I lean in the solid shadow of the mother’s body, against her flanks.

  To those who have already lived, an empty house is unimaginable. They build it only out of what has been placed by the hands of man: from the bricks that enclose space to the rugs put down and curtains drawn there, once – how can there be nobody? The ornamental wooden valance that is breaking away from the eaves is the blows of the grandfather who nailed it. The Virgin with a cake-doily gilt lace halo under glass is the bedroom faith of a grandmother. An old newspaper is the eyes of one who read it.

  When I vacate this first place I’ll leave behind the place that was all places. I’ll leave behind nothing. There will be nothing – for I’m taking all with me, I’m taking it on . . . all, all, everything. In my swollen sex, obscene for my size, in my newly pressed-into-shape cranium containing the seed pearls of my brain cells, in my minute hands creased as bank notes or immigration papers. Head down, shoving, driven, meeting violence with violence, casting myself out like Jonah from the heaving host whale, bursting lungs that haven’t breathed yet, swimming for dear life . . .

  I don’t see them covering their eyes in secret, I don’t hear them wailing: it will all be gone through again!

  Behind me, the torn membranes of my moorings.

  Hauled from the deep where there is no light for sight I find eyes. The ancient Mediterranean sun smithereens against me like a joyous glass dashed to the ground.

  Ta mère fit un pet foireux et tu naquis de sa colique.

  I begin again.

  Oral History

  There’s always been one house like a white man’s house in the village of Dilolo. Built of brick with a roof that bounced signals from the sun. You could see it through the mopane trees as you did the flash of paraffin tins the women carried on their heads, bringing water from the river. The rest of the village was built of river mud, grey, shaped by the hollows of hands, with reed thatch and poles of mopane from which the leaves had been ripped like fish scales.

  It was the chief’s house. Some chiefs have a car as well but this was not an important chief, the clan is too small for that, and he had the usual stipend from the government. If they had given him a car he would have had no use for it. There is no road: the army patrol Land Rovers come upon the people’s cattle, startled as buck, in the mopane scrub. The village has been there a long time. The chief’s grandfather was the clan’s grandfathers’ chief, and his name is the same as that of the chief who waved his warriors to down assegais and took the first Bible from a Scottish Mission Board white man. Seek and ye shall find, the missionaries said.

  The villagers in those parts don’t look up, any more, when the sting-shaped army planes fly over twice a day. Only fish-eagles are disturbed, take off, screaming, keen swerving heads lifting into their invaded domain of sky. The men who have been away to work on the mines can read, but there are no newspapers. The people hear over the radio the government’s count of how many army trucks have been blown up, how many white soldiers are going to be buried with full military honours – something that is apparently white people’s way with their dead.

  The chief had a radio, and he could read. He read to the headmen the letter from the government saying that anyone hiding or giving food and water to those who were fighting against the government’s army would be put in prison. He read another letter from the government saying that to protect the village from these men who went over the border and came back with guns to kill people and burn huts, anybody who walked in the bush after dark would be shot. Some of the young men who, going courting or drinking to the next village, might have been in danger, were no longer at home in their fathers’ care anyway. The young go away: once it was to the mines, now – the radio said – it was over the border to learn how to fight. Sons walked out of the clearing of mud huts; past the chief’s house; past the children playing with the models of police patrol Land Rovers made out of twisted wire. The children called out, ‘Where are you going?’ The young men didn’t answer and they hadn’t come back.

  There was a church of mopane and mud with a mopane flagpole to fly a white flag when somebody died; the funeral service was more or less the same protestant one the missionaries brought from Scotland and it was combined with older rituals to entrust the newly dead to the ancestors. Ululating women with whitened faces sent them on their way to the missionaries’ last judgement. The children were baptised with names chosen by portent in consultation between the mother and an old man who read immutable fate in the fall of small bones cast like dice from a horn cup. On all occasions and most Saturday nights there was a beer-drink, which the chief attended. An upright chair from his house was brought out for him although everyone else squatted comfortably on the sand, and he was offered the first taste from an old decorated gourd dipper (other people drank from baked-bean or pilchard tins) – it is the way of people of the village.

  It is also the way of the tribe to which the clan belongs and the subcontinent to which the tribe belongs, from Matadi in the west to Mombasa in the east, from Entebbe in the north to Empangeni in the south, that everyone is welcome at a beer-drink. No traveller or passer-by, poling down the river in his pirogue, leaving the snake-skin trail of his bicycle wheels through the sand, betraying his approach – if the dogs are sleeping by the cooking fires and the children have left their homemade highways – only by the brittle fragmentation of the dead leaves as he comes unseen through miles of mopane, is a presence to be questioned. Everyone for a long way round on both sides of the border near Dilolo has a black skin, speaks the same language and shares the custom of hospitality. Before the government started to shoot people at night to stop more young men leaving when no one was awake to ask, ‘Where are you going?’ people thought nothing of walking ten miles from one village to another for a beer-drink.

  But unfamiliar faces have become unusual. If the firelight caught such a face, it backed into darkness. No one remarked the face. Not even the smallest child who never took its eyes off it, crouching down among the knees of men with soft, little boy’s lips held in wonderingly over teeth as if an invisible grown-up hand were clamped there. The young girls giggled and flirted from the background, as usual. The older men didn’t ask for news of relatives or friends outside the village. The chief seemed not to see one face or faces in distinction from any other. His eyes came to rest instead on some of the older men. He gazed and they felt it.

  Coming out of the back door of his brick house with its polished concrete steps, early in the morning, he hailed one of them. The man was passing with his hobbling cows and steadily bleating goats; stopped, with the turn of one who will continue on his way in a moment almost without breaking step. But the summons was for him. The chief wore a frayed collarless shirt and old trousers, like the man, but he was never barefoot. In the hand with a big steel watch on the wrist, he carried his thick-framed spectacles, and drew down his nose between the fingers of the other hand; he had the authoritative body of a man who still has his sexual powers but his eyes flickered against the light of the sun and secreted flecks of matter like cold cream at the corners. After the greetings usual between a chief and one of his headmen together with whom, from the retreat in the mopane forest where they lay together in the same age group recovering from circumcision, he
had long ago emerged a man, the chief said, ‘When is your son coming back?’

  ‘I have no news.’

  ‘Did he sign for the mines?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’s gone to the tobacco farms?’

  ‘He didn’t tell us.’

  ‘Gone away to find work and doesn’t tell his mother? What sort of child is that? Didn’t you teach him?’

  The goats were tonguing three hunchback bushes that were all that was left of a hedge round the chief’s house. The man took out a round tin dented with child’s toothmarks and taking care not to spill any snuff, dosed himself. He gestured at the beasts, for permission: ‘They’re eating up your house . . .’ He made a move towards the necessity to drive them on.

  ‘There is nothing left there to eat.’ The chief ignored his hedge, planted by his oldest wife who had been to school at the mission up the river. He stood among the goats as if he would ask more questions. Then he turned and went back to his yard, dismissing himself. The other man watched. It seemed he might call after; but instead drove his animals with the familiar cries, this time unnecessarily loud and frequent.

  Often an army patrol Land Rover came to the village. No one could predict when this would be because it was not possible to count the days in between and be sure that so many would elapse before it returned, as could be done in the case of a tax collector or cattle-dipping officer. But it could be heard minutes away, crashing through the mopane like a frightened animal, and dust hung marking the direction from which it was coming. The children ran to tell. The women went from hut to hut. One of the chief’s wives would enjoy the importance of bearing the news: ‘The government is coming to see you.’

  He would be out of his house when the Land Rover stopped and a black soldier (murmuring towards the chief the required respectful greeting in their own language) jumped out and opened the door for the white soldier. The white soldier had learnt the names of all the local chiefs. He gave greetings with white men’s brusqueness: ‘Everything all right?’

  And the chief repeated to him: ‘Everything is all right.’

  ‘No one been bothering you in this village?’

  ‘No one is troubling us.’

  But the white soldier signalled to his black men and they went through every hut busy as wives when they are cleaning, turning over bedding, thrusting gun-butts into the pile of ash and rubbish where the chickens searched, even looking in, their eyes dazzled by darkness, to the hut where one of the old women who had gone crazy had to be kept most of the time. The white soldier stood beside the Land Rover waiting for them. He told the chief of things that were happening not far from the village; not far at all. The road that passed five kilometres away had been blown up. ‘Someone plants landmines in the road and as soon as we repair it they put them there again. Those people come from across the river and they pass this way. They wreck our vehicles and kill people.’

  The heads gathered round weaved as if at the sight of bodies laid there horrifyingly before them.

  ‘They will kill you, too – burn your huts, all of you – if you let them stay with you.’

  A woman turned her face away: ‘Aïe-aïe-aïe-aïe.’

  His forefinger half-circled his audience. ‘I’m telling you. You’ll see what they do.’

  The chief’s latest wife, taken only the year before and of the age group of his elder grandchildren, had not come out to listen to the white man. But she heard from others what he had said, and fiercely smoothing her legs with grease, demanded of the chief, ‘Why does he want us to die, that white man!’

  Her husband, who had just been a passionately shuddering lover, became at once one of the important old with whom she did not count and could not argue. ‘You talk about things you don’t know. Don’t speak for the sake of making a noise.’

  To punish him, she picked up the strong, young girl’s baby she had borne him and went out of the room where she slept with him on the big bed that had come down the river by barge, before the army’s machine guns were pointing at the other bank.

  He appeared at his mother’s hut. There, the middle-aged man on whom the villagers depended, to whom the government looked when it wanted taxes paid and culling orders carried out, became a son – the ageless category, no matter from which age group to another he passed in the progression of her life and his. The old woman was at her toilet. The great weight of her body settled around her where she sat on a reed mat outside the door. He pushed a stool under himself. Set out was a small mirror with a pink plastic frame and stand, in which he caught sight of his face, screwed up. A large black comb; a little carved box inlaid with red lucky beans she had always had, he used to beg to be allowed to play with it fifty years ago. He waited, not so much out of respect as in the bond of indifference to all outside their mutual contact that reasserts itself when lions and their kin lie against one another.

  She cocked a glance, swinging the empty loops of her stretched ear lobes. He did not say what he had come for.

  She had chosen a tiny bone spoon from the box and was poking with trembling care up each round hole of distended nostril. She cleaned the crust of dried snot and dust from her delicate instrument and flicked the dirt in the direction away from him.

  She said: ‘Do you know where your sons are?’

  ‘Yes, I know where my sons are. You have seen three of them here today. Two are in school at the mission. The baby – he’s with the mother.’ A slight smile, to which the old woman did not respond. Her preferences among the sons had no connection with sexual pride.

  ‘Good. You can be glad of all that. But don’t ask other people about theirs.’

  As often when people who share the same blood share the same thought, for a moment mother and son looked exactly alike, he old-womanish, she mannish.

  ‘If the ones we know are missing, there are not always empty places,’ he said.

  She stirred consideringly in her bulk. Leaned back to regard him: ‘It used to be that all children were our own children. All sons our sons. Old-fashion, these people here’ – the hard English word rolled out of their language like a pebble, and came to rest where aimed, at his feet.

  It was spring: the mopane leaves turn, drying up and dying, spattering the sand with blood and rust – a battlefield, it must have looked, from the patrol planes. In August there is no rain to come for two months yet. Nothing grows but the flies hatch. The heat rises daily and the nights hold it, without a stir, till morning. On these nights the radio voice carried so clearly it could be heard from the chief’s house all through the village. Many were being captured in the bush and killed by the army – seek and destroy was what the white men said now – and many in the army were being set upon in the bush or blown up in their trucks and buried with full military honours. This was expected to continue until October because the men in the bush knew that it was their last chance before the rains came and chained their feet in mud.

  On these hot nights when people cannot sleep anyway, beer-drinks last until very late. People drink more; the women know this, and brew more. There is a fire but no one sits close round it.

  Without a moon the dark is thick with heat; when the moon is full the dark shimmers thinly in a hot mirage off the river. Black faces are blue, there are watermarks along noses and biceps. The chief sat on his chair and wore shoes and socks in spite of the heat; those drinking nearest him could smell the suffering of his feet. The planes of jaw and lips he noticed in moonlight molten over them, moonlight pouring moths broken from white cases on the mopane and mosquitoes rising from the river, pouring glory like the light in the religious pictures people got at the mission – he had seen those faces about lately in the audacity of day, as well. An ox had been killed and there was the scent of meat sizzling in the village (just look at the behaviour of the dogs, they knew) although there was no marriage or other festival that called for someone to slaughter one of his beasts. When the chief allowed himself, at least, to meet the eyes of a stranger, the whites that
had been showing at an oblique angle disappeared and he took rather than saw the full gaze of the seeing eye: the pupils with their defiance, their belief, their claim, hold, on him. He let it happen only once. For the rest, he saw their arrogant lifted jaws to each other and warrior smiles to the girls, as they drank. The children were drawn to them, fighting one another silently for places close up. Towards midnight – his watch had its own glowing galaxy – he left his chair and did not come back from the shadows where men went to urinate. Often at beer-drinks the chief would go home while others were still drinking.

  He went to his brick house whose roof shone almost bright as day. He did not go to the room where his new wife and sixth son would be sleeping in the big bed, but simply took from the kitchen, where it was kept when not in use, a bicycle belonging to one of his hangers-on, relative or retainer. He wheeled it away from the huts in the clearing, his village and grandfather’s village that disappeared so quickly behind him in the mopane, and began to ride through the sand. He was not afraid he would meet a patrol and be shot; alone at night in the sand forest, the forested desert he had known before and would know beyond his span of life, he didn’t believe in the power of a roving band of government men to end that life. The going was heavy but he had mastered when young the art of riding on this, the only terrain he knew, and the ability came back. In an hour he arrived at the army post, called out who he was to the sentry with a machine gun, and had to wait, like a beggar rather than a chief, to be allowed to approach and be searched. There were black soldiers on duty but they woke the white man. It was the one who knew his name, his clan, his village, the way these modern white men were taught. He seemed to know at once why the chief had come; frowning in concentration to grasp details, his mouth was open in a smile and the point of his tongue curled touching at back teeth the way a man will verify facts one by one on his fingers. ‘How many?’