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Life Times Page 39

by Nadine Gordimer


  A vet said the teeth-marks on the dead pets, Mrs Sheena McLeod’s ‘Natasha’ and the Bezuidenhout family’s beloved ‘Fritzie’, were consistent with the type of bite given by a wild cat. Less than a hundred years ago, viverra civetta must have been a common species in the koppies around the city; nature sometimes came back, forgot time and survived eight-lane freeways, returning to ancestral haunts. He recalled the suicidal swim of two elephants who struck out making for ancient mating grounds across Lake Kariba, beneath which 5,000 square kilometres of their old ruminants’ pathways were drowned in a man-made sea. A former pet-shop owner wrote to Readers’ Views with the opinion that the animal almost certainly was a vervet monkey, an escaped pet. Those who had seen it insisted it was a larger species, though most likely of the ape family. Stanley Dobrow and his two friends described the face reflected between trees, beside them on the surface of the swimming pool: dark face with ‘far-back’ eyes – whether what broke the image was Stanley’s scramble from the water or the advance of the caterpillar device that crawled about the pool sucking up dirt, they never agreed.

  Whatever it was, it made a nice change from the usual sort of news, these days. Nothing but strikes, exchanges of insults between factions of what used to be a power to be relied upon, disputes over boundaries that had been supposed to divide peace and prosperity between all, rioting students, farmers dissatisfied with low prices, consumers paying more for bread and mealie meal, more insults – these coming in the form of boycotts and censures from abroad, beyond the fished-out territorial waters. It was said the local fishing industry was ruined by poaching Russians (same old bad news).

  Now this event that was causing excitement over in the Johannesburg suburbs: that was the kind of item there used to be – before the papers started calling blacks ‘Mr’ and publishing the terrible things communists taught them to say about the white man. Those good old stories of giant pumpkins and – Mrs Naas Klopper remembered it so well – when she was a little child, that lion that lived with a little fox terrier in its cage at the Jo’burg zoo; this monkey or whatever it was gave you something to wonder about again, talk about; it had something to do with your own life, it could happen to you (imagine! what a scare, to see a thing like that, some creature jumping out in your own yard), not like all that other stuff, that happened somewhere else, somewhere you’d never seen and never would, the United Nations there in New York, or the blacks’ places – Soweto.

  Mrs Naas Klopper (she always called herself, although her name was Hester) read in Die Transvaaler about the creature in the Johannesburg suburbs while waiting for the rice to boil in time for lunch. She sat in the split-level lounge of what she was always quietly aware of as her ‘lovely home’ Naas had built according to her artistic ideas when first he began to make money out of his agency for the sale of farmland and agricultural plots, fifteen years ago. Set on several acres outside a satellite country town where Klopper’s Eiendoms Beperk flourished, the house had all the features of prosperous suburban houses in Johannesburg or Pretoria. The rice was boiling in an all-electric kitchen with eye-level microwave oven and cabinet deep-freezer. The bedrooms were en suite, with pot plants in the respectively pink and green bathrooms. The living room in which she sat on a nylon-velvet covered sofa had pastel plastic Venetian blinds as well as net curtains and matching nylon velvet drapes, and the twelve chairs in the dining area were covered with needlepoint worked in a design of shepherdesses and courtiers by Mrs Naas Klopper herself; the dried-flower-and-shell pictures were also her work, she had crocheted the tasselled slings by which plants were suspended above the cane furniture on the glassed sunporch, and it was on a trip to the Victoria Falls, when Rhodesia was still Rhodesia, that she had bought the hammered copper plaques. The TV set was behind a carved console door. Stools set around the mini bar again bore the original touch – they were covered not exactly with modish zebra skin, but with the skins of impala which Naas himself had shot. Outside, there was a palette-shaped swimming pool like the one in which Stanley and friends, forty kilometres away in Johannesburg, had seen the face.

  Yet although the lovely home was every brick as good as any modern lovely home in the city, it had something of the enclosing gloom of the farmhouse in which Naas had spent his childhood. He never brought that childhood to the light of reminiscence or reflection because he had put all behind him; he was on the other side of the divide history had opened between the farmer and the trader, the past when the Boers were a rural people and the uitlanders ran commerce, and the present, when the Afrikaners governed an industrialised state and had become entrepreneurs, stockbrokers, beer millionaires – all the synonyms for traders. When he began to plan the walls to house his wife’s artistic ideas, a conception of dimness, long gaunt passages by which he had been contained at his Ma’s place, and his Ouma’s, loomed its proportions around the ideas. He met Mrs Naas now in the dark bare passage that led to the kitchen, on her way to drain the rice. They never used the front door, except for visitors; it seemed there were visitors: ‘Ag, Hester, can you quickly make some coffee or tea?’

  ‘I’m just getting lunch! It’s all ready.’

  There was something unnatural, assumed, about him that she had long associated with him ‘doing business’. He did not have time to doff the manner for her, as a man will throw down his hat as he comes into the kitchen from his car in the yard. ‘All right. Who is it, then?’

  ‘Some people about the Kleynhans place. They’re in the car, so long. A young couple. Unlock the front door.’

  ‘Why’d you say tea?’

  ‘They speak English.’

  A good businessman thinks of everything; his wife smiled. And a good home-maker is always prepared. Her arched step in high-heeled shoes went to slide the bolt on the Spanish-style hand-carved door; while her husband flushed the lavatory and went out again through the kitchen, she took down her cake tins filled with rusks and home-made glazed biscuits to suit all tastes, English and other. The kettle was on and the cups set out on a cross-stitched traycloth before she sensed a press of bodies through the front entrance. She kept no servant in the house – had the gardener’s wife in to clean three times a week, and the washwoman worked outside in the laundry – and could always feel at once, even if no sound were made, when the pine aerosol-fresh space in her lovely home was displaced by any body other than her own.

  Naas’s voice, speaking English the way we Afrikaners do (she thought of it), making it a softer, kinder language than it is, was the one she could make out, coming from the lounge. When he paused, perhaps they were merely smiling in the gap; were shy.

  A young man got up to take the tray from her the moment she appeared; yes, silent, clumsy, polite – nicely brought up. The introductions were a bit confused, Naas didn’t seem sure he had the name right, and she, Mrs Naas, had to say in her English, comfortable and friendly – turning to the young woman: ‘What was your name, again?’

  And the young man answered for his wife. ‘She’s Anna.’

  Mrs Naas laughed. ‘Yes, Anna, that’s a good Afrikaans name, too, you know. But the other name?’

  ‘I’m Charles Rosser.’ He was looking anxiously for a place to set down the tray. Mrs Naas guided him to one of her coffee tables, moving a vase of flowers.

  ‘Now is it with milk and sugar, Mrs Rosser? I’ve got lemon here, too, our own lemons from the garden.’

  The young woman didn’t expect to be waited on: really well brought up people. She was already there, standing to help serve the men; tall, my, and how thin! You could see her hip bones through her crinkly cotton skirt, one of those Indian skirts all the girls go around in nowadays. She wore glasses. A long thin nose spoilt her face, otherwise quite nice-looking, nothing on it but a bit of blue on the eyelids, and the forehead tugged tight by flat blonde hair twisted into a knob.

  ‘It’s tiring work all right, looking for accommodation.’ (Naas knew all the estate agent’s words, in English, he hardly ever was caught out saying ‘house’
when a more professional term existed.) ‘Thirsty work.’

  The young man checked the long draught he was taking from his cup. He smiled to Mrs Naas. ‘This is very welcome.’

  ‘Oh, only a pleasure. I know when I go to town to shop – I can tell you, I come home and I’m finished! That’s why we built out here, you know; I said to my husband, it’s going to be nothing but more cars, cars, and more motorbikes—’

  ‘And she’s talking of fifteen years ago! Now it’s a madhouse, Friday and Saturday, all the Bantu buses coming into town from the location, the papers and beer cans thrown everywhere—’ (Naas offered rusks and biscuits again) that’s why you’re wise to look for somewhere a bit out – not far out, mind you, the wife needs to be able to come in to go to the supermarket and that, you don’t want to feel cut off—’

  ‘I must say, I never feel cut off!’ his wife enjoyed supporting him. ‘I’ve got my peace and quiet, and there’s always something to do with my hands.’

  Naas spoke as if he had not already told her: ‘We’re going to look over the Kleynhans place.’

  ‘Oh, I thought you’ve come from there!’

  ‘We going now-now. I just thought, why pass by the house, let’s at least have a cup of tea . . .’

  ‘Is there anybody there?’

  ‘Just the boy who looks after the garden and so on.’

  When they spoke English together it seemed to them to come out like the dialogue from a television series. And the young couple sat mute, as the Klopper grandchildren did before the console when they came to spend a night.

  ‘Can I fill up?’ Standing beside her with his cup the young man reminded her not of Dawie who had Naas’s brown eyes, didn’t take after her side of the family at all, but of Herman, her sister Miemie’s son. The same glistening, young blond beard, so manly it seemed growing like a plant while you looked at it. The short pink nose. Even the lips, pink and sun-cracked as a kid’s.

  ‘Come on! Have some more biscuits – please help yourself . . . And Mrs Rosser? – please – there’s another whole tin in the kitchen . . . I forget there’s no children in the house any more, I bake too much every time.’

  She was shy, that girl; at last a smile out of her.

  ‘Thanks, I’ll have a rusk.’

  ‘Well I’m glad you enjoy my rusks, an old, old family recipe. Oh you’ll like the Kleynhans place. I always liked it, didn’t I, Naas – I often say to my husband, that’s the kind of place we ought to have. I’ve got a lovely home here, of course I wouldn’t really change it, but it’s so big, now, too big for two people. A lot of work; I do it all myself, I don’t want anyone in my place, I don’t want all that business of having to lock up my sugar and tea – no, I’ll rather do everything myself. I can’t stand to feel one of them there at my back all the time.’

  ‘But there’s nothing to be afraid of in this area.’ Naas did not look at her but corrected her drift at a touch of the invisible signals of long familiarity.

  ‘Oh no, this’s a safe place to live. I’m alone all day, only the dog in the yard, and she’s so old now – did she even wake up and come round the front when you came? – ag, poor old Ounooi! It’s safe here, not like the other side of the town, near the location. You can’t even keep your garden hose there, even the fence around your house – they’ll come and take everything. But this side . . . no one will worry you.’

  Perhaps the young man was not quite reassured. ‘How far away would the nearest neighbours be?’

  ‘No, not far. There’s Reynecke about three or four kilometres, the other side of the koppie – there’s a nice little koppie, a bit of real veld, you know, on the southern border of the property.’

  ‘And the other sides? Facing the house?’ The young man looked over to his wife, whose feet were together under her long skirt, cup neatly balanced on her lap, and eyes on cup, inattentive; then he smiled to Mr and Mrs Naas. ‘We don’t want to live in the country and at the same time be disturbed by neighbours’ noise.’

  Naas laughed and put a hand on each knee, thrusting his head forward amiably; over the years he had developed gestures that marked each stage in the conclusion of a land deal, as each clause goes to comprise a contract.

  ‘You won’t hear nothing but the birds.’

  On a Thursday afternoon Doctors Milton Caro, pathologist, Grahame Fraser-Smith, maxillo-facial surgeon, Arthur Methus, gynaecologist and Dolf van Gelder, orthopaedic surgeon, had an encounter on Houghton Golf Course. Doctors Caro, Fraser-Smith, Methus and van Gelder are all distinguished specialists in their fields, with degrees from universities abroad as well as at home, and they are not available to the sick at all hours and on all days, like any general practitioner. In fact, since so many of the younger medical specialists have emigrated to take up appointments in safer countries – America, Canada, Australia – patients sometimes have the embarrassment of having recovered spontaneously before arriving for appointments that have to be booked a minimum of three months ahead. Others may have died; in which case, the ruling by the Medical Association that appointments not kept will be charged for, is waived.

  The doctors do not consult on Thursday afternoons. The foursome, long-standing members of the Houghton Club, has an almost equally long-standing arrangement to tee off at 2 p.m. (Caro and van Gelder also take long walks together, carrying stout sticks, on Sunday mornings. Van Gelder would like to make jogging a punishable offence, like drunken driving. He sees too many cases of attributable Achilles tendonitis, of chondromalacia patellae caused by repetitive gliding of the patella over the femur, and, of course, of chronic strain of the ligaments, particularly in flat-footed patients.) On this particular afternoon Fraser-Smith and van Gelder were a strong partnership, and Methus was letting Caro down rather badly. It is this phenomenon of an erratic handicap that provides the pleasure mutually generated by the company. The style of their communication is banter; without error, there would be nothing to banter about. This Thursday the supreme opportunity arose because it was not Methus, in his ham-handed phase, who sent a ball way off into a grove of trees, but Fraser-Smith, who on the previous hole had scored an eagle. Van Gelder groaned, Fraser-Smith cursed himself in an amazement that heightened Caro’s and Methus’s mock glee. And then Caro, who had marked where the ball fell into shade, went good-naturedly with Fraser-Smith, who was short-sighted, over to the trees. Fraser-Smith, still cursing amiably, moved into the grove where Caro directed.

  ‘Which side of the bush? Here? I’ll never find the sodding thing.’ At Guy’s Hospital thirty years before he had picked up the panache of British cuss-words he never allowed himself to forget.

  Caro, despite the Mayo Clinic and distinguished participation at international congresses on forensic medicine, called back in the gruff, slow homeliness of a Jewish country storekeeper’s son whose early schooling was in Afrikaans. ‘Ag, man, d’you want me to come and bleddy well hit it for you? It must be just on the left there, man!’

  Exactly where the two men were gazing, someone – something that must have been crouching – rose, a shape broken by the shapes of trees; there was an instant when they, it, were aware of one another. And then whoever or whatever it was was gone, in a soft crashing confusion among branches and bushes. Caro shouted – ridiculously, he was the first to admit – ‘Hey! Hey!’

  ‘Well,’ (they were embellishing their story at the clubhouse) ‘I thought he’d pinched old Grahame’s ball, and I wanted to say thanks very much, because Methus and I, we were playing like a pair of clowns, we needed some monkey-business to help us out . . .’

  Fraser-Smith was sure the creature had gone up a tree, although when the foursome went to look where he thought it had climbed, there was nothing. Methus said if it hadn’t been for all the newspaper tales they’d been reading, none of them would have got the mad idea it was anything but a man – one of the black out-of-works, the dronkies who have their drinking sessions in there; wasn’t it true they were a problem for the groundsmen, no fence seemed to keep
them and their litter out? There were the usual empty beer cans under the tree where Fraser-Smith said he . . . ‘Anyway, the papers talked about a monkey, and we all saw – this was something big . . . a black, that’s all, and he got a scare . . . you know, how you can’t make out a black face in shadow, among leaves.’

  Caro spoke aside: ‘A black having a crap, exactly . . .’

  But van Gelder was certain. No one had seen, in the moment the being had looked at the foursome, and the foursome had looked at it, a face, distinct garments, limbs. Van Gelder had observed the gait, and in gait van Gelder read bones. ‘It was not a monkey. It was not a man. That was a baboon.’

  The couple didn’t have much to say for themselves, that day while Naas Klopper was showing them over the Kleynhans place. In his experience this was a bad sign. Clients who took an instant liking to a property always thought they were being shrewd by concealing their keenness to buy under voluble fault-picking calculated to bring down the price. They would pounce on disadvantages in every feature of aspect and construction. This meant the deed of sale was as good as signed. Those who said nothing were the ones who had taken an instant dislike to a property, or – as if they could read his mind, because, hell man, he was an old hand at the game, he never let slip a thing – uncannily understood at once that it was a bad buy. When people trailed around in silence behind him he filled that silence entirely by himself, every step and second of it, slapping with the flat of a hand the pump of whose specifications, volume of water per hour, etcetera, he spared no detail, opening stuck cupboard doors and scratching a white-ridged thumbnail down painted walls to the accompaniment of patter about storage space and spotless condition; and all the time he was wanting just to turn round and herd right out the front door people who were wasting his time.

 

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