Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  He says he doesn’t know that Amnesia woman.

  I put it to you it’s inconceivable you don’t remember whether you were present on the night of the crime.

  He says he never made a child with that woman, My Lord.

  Out of their amusement at his nonsense there was a rise of animation, change of key to talk of what or was not to be understood between the lines of reportage and guards of commentary; in this – the events of their world, which moved beneath the events of the world the newspapers reflected – the real intimacy latent in their strangeness to one another, their apparent ill-assortment, discovered itself. There was sudden happiness – yes, unlike any private happiness left behind, independent of circumstance, because all four had left behind, too, the ‘normal’ fears, repugnancies, prejudices, reservations that ‘circumstance’ as they had known it – what colour they were, what that colour had meant where they lived – had been for them. Nothing but a surge of intermittent current: but the knowledge that it would well up again made it possible to live with the irritations and inadequacies they chafed against one another now, waiting. Charles said it for them, grinning suddenly after an argument one day: ‘Getting in one another’s hair, here – it’s a form of freedom, ay?’

  Apart from politics, there wasn’t much to engage, in Charles’s Sunday papers. One printed for blacks reported the usual slum murders perpetrated with unorthodox weapons to hand; a soccer club scandal, and deaths at a wedding after drinking tainted homebrew. The whites’ papers, of which Charles had brought several, and in two languages, had a financial crash, a millionaire’s divorce settlement, a piece about that monkey no one could catch, which had stolen a maid’s dinner.

  Sunday torpor settled on the four. Charles slept with his beard-ringed mouth bubbling slightly, as Naas Klopper was sleeping ten kilometres away in his split-level lounge. Eddie wandered out to the yard, took off his shirt and sat on the back step in the sun, smoking, drinking a Coke and listening to a reggae tape as any young labourer would spend his lunch hour on the pavement outside whites’ shops.

  On a radio panel ‘Talking of Nature’ an SPCA official took the opportunity to condemn the cruelty of throwing out pet monkeys to fend for themselves when they outgrow the dimensions of a suitable domestic pet. Mariella Chapman heard him while preparing plums for jam according to the recipe given by her new mother-in-law over the weekend. Mariella and her husband had gone to visit his parents on the farm for the first time since their marriage five months ago, and had come home with a supermarket bag of fresh-picked plums and a leg of venison. Marais (his given name was his mother’s maiden name) hung the leg before he went on duty early on Monday at John Vorster Square; he had to put up a hook in the kitchen window because their modern house didn’t have a back stoep like the old house at home.

  At police headquarters Sergeant Chapman (an English stoker in the 1880s jumped ship, married an Afrikaans girl and left the name scratched on a Boer family tree) took over the 7 a.m. shift of interrogation of one of the people held in detention there. It was a nice-enough-looking place to be stationed, right in town. The blue spandrel panels and glimpses of potted plants in the façade it presented to the passing city freeway could have been those of an apartment block; the cells in which these people were kept were within the core of the building.

  It was tiring work, you need a lot of concentration, watching the faces of these politicals, never mind just getting something out of their mouths. He kept his hands off them. Unless, of course, expressly instructed by his superiors to do certain things necessary to make some of them talk. When they got out – particularly the white ones, with their clever lawyer friends and plenty money coming from the churches and the communists overseas – they often brought court cases against the state, you could find yourself standing there accused of assault, they tried to blacken your name in front of your wife, your mother and dad, who knew only your kindness and caresses. He wanted promotion, but he didn’t want that. He did his duty. He did what he was told. And if it ever came to court – oh boy, I’m telling you, jong – all was on the Major’s instructions, he could swear on the Bible to that.

  No wonder most of them talked in the end. It was hard enough to do a number of shifts with them during the day or night, with breaks in between for a cup of coffee, something to eat, and best of all, a walk outside in the street; whereas most of them, like this tough nut he was handling with the Major now, were questioned by a roster of personnel twenty-four, thirty-six hours non-stop. And, as the Major had taught, even when these people were given coffee, a cigarette, allowed to sit down, they knew they were being watched and had to watch themselves all the time, for what they might let slip. It was one of the elementary lessons of this work that the gratification of a draw of smoke into the lungs might suddenly succeed in breaking the stoniest will and breaching trained revolutionary hostility towards and contempt for interrogators. (The Major was a very clever, highly educated and well-read man – you had to have someone like that for the class of detainee that was coming in these days, they’d just run rings round someone who’d only got his matric.) The Major said it didn’t even matter if you got to feel sorry for them – the Major knew about this, although you always hid it; ‘a bond of sympathy’ was the first real step on the way to extracting a confession. Well, Sergeant Chapman didn’t have any such feelings today. Inside his uniform his body was filled with the sap of sun and fresh air; the sight of the sleepless, unshaven man standing there, dazed and smelly (they sweated even if they shivered, under interrogation) made him sick (the Major warned that occasional revulsion was natural, but unproductive).

  Why couldn’t these people live like any normal person? A man with this one’s brains and university degrees, English-speaking and whatnot, could become a big shot in business instead of a trade unionist letting a bunch of blacks strike and get him in trouble. When you interrogated a detainee, you had to familiarise yourself with all the details supplied by informers for his file; this one had a well-off father, a doctor wife, twin babies, an affair with a pretty student (admittedly, he had met her through her research connected with unions) and his parents-in-law’s cottage at one of the best places for fishing on the coast, for his holidays. What more does a white man want? With a black man, all right, he wants what he can’t have, and that can make a man sit eating his heart out in jail half his life. But how good to walk, on Saturday, to the dam where you used to swim as a kid, to be greeted (these people who incite blacks against us should just have seen) by the farm boys at the kraal with laughter and pleasure at your acquisition of a wife; to go out with your father to shoot jackals at sunset. There’s something wrong with all these people who become enemies of their own country: this private theory was really the only aspect of his work – for security reasons – he talked about to his girl, who, of course (he sometimes smiled to forget), was now his wife. Something wrong with them. They’re enemies because they can’t enjoy their lives the way a normal white person in South Africa does.

  He could get a cold drink or coffee and a snack in the canteen at John Vorster but in the early evening when he knew he’d have to stay late, maybe all night, to work on this man with the Major, he’d had just about enough of the place. He took his break where he and his mates liked to go, the Chinese takeaway and restaurant just down the street.

  It had no name up and was entered through an old shopfront. There was the high sizzle of frying and the full volume of TV programmes, and the Chinese and his wife moved about very softly. Early in the day when there was no television transmission, a small radio diffused cheerful commercials at the same volume above their pale faces from whose blunt features and flat eyes expression seemed worn away as a cake of soap loses definition in daily use. They belonged to the ancient guild of those harmless itinerant providers, of all nationalities, who wheel their barrows close to the sinister scenes of life – the bombed towns, the refugee encampments, the fallen cities – providing soup or rum indiscriminately to victims in
rags or invaders in tanks, so long as these can pay the modest charge. Convenient to concentration camps there were such quiet couples, minding their own business, selling coffee and schnapps to refresh jackbooted men off duty. Perhaps the Chinese and his wife felt protected by John Vorster Square and whatever they did not want to know happened there; perhaps they felt threatened by its proximity; both reasons to know nothing. Their restaurant had few ethnic pretensions of the usual kind – no velveteen dragons or wind chimes – but they had put up a shelf on the wall where the large colour television set was placed like a miniature cinema screen, at awkward eye level for diners. In front of the TV they kept an area clear of tables and had ranged a dozen chairs for the use of policemen. The policemen were not expected to buy a meal, and for the price of a packet of chips and a cold drink could relax from their duties, so nearby. Although they were not supposed to take alcohol before resuming these, and the Chinese couple did not have a licence to sell it, beer was silently produced for those who, the couple knew without having to be asked aloud, wanted it. The young policemen, joking and kidding as they commented on the programmes they were watching, created a friendly enclave in the place. Diners who had nothing much to say to one another felt at least part of some animation. Family treats for children and grandmothers were popular there, because the food was cheap; children, always fascinated by the thrill and fear sensed in anything military or otherwise authoritarian, ate their grey chicken soup while watching the policemen.

  Sergeant Chapman found a few mates occupying the chairs. He joined them. The hot weather left the brand of their profession where their caps, now lying under their chairs, had pressed on their foreheads. Their private smog of cigarette smoke mingled with frying fumes wavered towards the TV screen; he was in time for the last ten minutes of an episode in a powdered-wig French historical romance, dubbed in Afrikaans. It ended with a duel, swords gnashing like knives and forks. ‘Hey, man, look at that!’

  ‘But they not really fighting, themselves. The actors. They have special experts dressed up like them.’

  ‘OK, I don’t say it’s the actors; but it’s helluva good, just the same, ay. To be able to do it so fast and not hurt each other.’

  Then came the Prime Minister, speaking with his special effects (a tooled leather prop desk, and velvet ceremonial drape as backdrop) on reconciliation and total onslaught. Conversations started up among the young policemen while he was projected overhead and the dinner customers chewed with respectful attention. Two plainclothes men in their casual-smart bar-lounge outfits came in to buy takeaways, evidently pleased with themselves, and did not even seem to notice that their volubility was making it difficult for people to follow the PM’s voice.

  Sergeant Chapman took the opportunity to phone Mariella, although she knew he would be home late, if at all tonight. He still had these impulses to talk to her about nothing, over the phone, the way you can ten times a day with your girl. The telephone was not available to ordinary customers but the policemen knew they could use it. Its sticky handpiece and the privacy of the noise that surrounded him as he dialled were familiar. But Mariella did not answer with her soft voice of flirtation. She was terribly excited. He didn’t know whether she was laughing or crying. When she went into the kitchen just now to get herself some bread and cheese (she wasn’t going to bother with supper if he didn’t come) the venison was gone from the window. Gone! Just like that. She went outside to see if it’d fallen from the hook – but no.

  ‘No, of course, man, I put that hook in fast.’

  ‘But still, it could have fallen – no, but anyway, the hook’s still there. So I saw the meat must’ve been pinched. I ran to the street and then I rushed round the yard—’

  ‘You shouldn’t do that when I’m not there, they’ll knife you if you try to catch them. I’ve told you, Mariella, stay in the house at night, don’t open to anyone.’

  But she was ‘so cross, so excited’ she fetched the torch and took the dog by the collar and looked everywhere.

  ‘That’s mad, man. I told you not to. Somebody could be tricking you to get you out of the house.’

  ‘No wait, there was nobody, Marais, nobody was there, it was all right.’

  ‘Well you were just lucky he’d already got away, I’m telling you, Mariella, you make me worry. There must be blacks hanging around the neighbourhood who know I’m often away late—’

  ‘No, listen, just wait till you hear – Buller pulled away from me and jumped over the fence into the lane, you know, there by the veggie patch, and he was barking and scratching. So I climbed over and there it was on the ground – only it wasn’t the meat and everything, it was just the bone. All the meat was torn off it! You’ll see, you’ll see the places where big teeth pulled away! It must have been that baboon, that monkey thing, no dog could reach so high! And there was an item on the radio about it only this morning! You’ll see, only a bone’s left.’ And now she began to giggle intimately. ‘Your poor Pa. He’ll be mad with you for hanging it like that. We’ll have to pretend we ate it, hay? Anyway, you’ll be pleased to know my jam’s OK. It set and everything . . . What should I do . . . send for the police? If it could be you that comes, I’ll be already making the bed warm . . .’

  Although she sounded so lovable he had to be serious and make her promise to keep all the windows locked. Apes were clever, they had hands like humans. It might even manage to lift a lever and get in, now that it had become so full of cheek. He came striding back to his mates with a swagger of sensation, a tale to tell. ‘You know that escaped monkey? Came to our place and swiped the Blesbok leg we brought from the farm yesterday! True as God! I hung it in the window this morning!’

  ‘Ag, man, Chapman. Your stories. Some black took it. Hanging it in the window! Wha’d’you think you were doing, man?’

  ‘No way, boet. It was that bloody thing, all right. She’s just told me: she found the bone there in the lane where it et it. Even a black’s not going to tear raw meat with his teeth.’

  That one was a toughie, all right – the detainee. When Sergeant Chapman took over again, the bloke was so groggy – like a loser after ten rounds – but he wouldn’t talk, he wouldn’t talk. At about ten o’clock he passed out and even the Major agreed to call it a day until six in the morning. Sergeant Chapman told him about the venison. The Major thought it a great joke but at the same time suggested the Sergeant’s young wife ought to learn how to handle a firearm. Next time it might be more than a monkey out there in the yard. Sergeant Chapman ought to know the situation.

  There had to be some sign that the plot was being cultivated. That was what black men were for; so Eddie hoed the mealie patch. Vusi kept to the house. He sat in his armchair and read a thick paperback whose pages, top and bottom, were splayed and puffed by exposure to climatic changes or by much thumbing. Africa Undermined: A History of the Mining Companies and the Underdevelopment of Africa: sometimes he would borrow a ballpoint from Joy, mark a passage. If he began to yawn and sigh this was a prelude to his suddenly getting up and disappearing into the back room. She would hear him tinkering there, the clink of small tools; she supposed it was to do with what was locked in the shed. She filled several hours a day with Teach Yourself Portuguese, but didn’t have her cassettes with her, here, as a guide to pronunciation, so had to concentrate on the grammar. Vusi could have helped her with German – but Portuguese!

  ‘How long were you there?’ He had trained in East Germany. That much she knew about him.

  ‘Two years and three months. We didn’t learn from books. You just have to begin to talk, man, you have to make people understand you when you want something, that’s the best way. But what d’you want to learn Portuguese for?’

  ‘Mozambique. Charles and I thought of going there. To live.’ She pulled her hair back down behind the arms of her glasses. ‘I might go, anyway. Teach for a while.’

  ‘What do you teach?’

  She made an awkward face. ‘I haven’t much, yet. But I can teach hi
story. The new education system there; I’d like to be involved . . . in something like that. One day.’ The two words passed to him as a token that she was not deserting.

  ‘Ja. You’d like it. It’s going to be a good place. And Charlie, he’s learning too?’

  ‘He was. But not now.’

  Vusi picked up her book and tried out a phrase or two, smiled at his poor effort.

  ‘You do speak Portuguese.’

  ‘Some words . . . I was only there a couple of months, everyone talks English to you.’ He managed, with an accent better than hers, a few more phrases, as if for his and her amusement.

  He sat in his chair again, waiting, his face as he himself would never see it, not in any photograph or mirror. He was possessed by an expression far from anyone’s reach, so deep in the past of himself, a sorrow he did not consciously feel there in the watergleam of his black eyes hidden in the ancient cave of skull, in the tenuousness of life in the fine gills of the nostrils, the extraordinary unconscious settling of the grooved lips – lips that, when he was unaware of himself, not using them to shape the half-articulate communication of a poorly educated black man’s English, held in their form what has never been, might still be spoken.

  Now when he did speak, on the conscious level of their being in the room together, it seemed to her he did not know who he was; she had to make the quick adjustment to his working perception of himself. ‘You not really married?’

  She looked at his mystery, while he showed simple curiosity.

  ‘No. Not really anything.’

  He understood – was meant to understand? – she doesn’t sleep with Charlie. If so, it was a confidence that licensed questions. ‘What’s the idea?’