Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  ‘Oh my God. You’d better stop going to town.’

  She did not complain. Her hair was put up in an odd knot on the side of her head – she was a woman, after all, she played about with her appearance, waiting. The way of doing her hair was very unattractive; on the side from which it was pulled over, the bone behind her ear was prominent and her skull looked flattened. ‘And what was that Cyclops eye on his forehead?’

  Eddie winced, puzzled. ‘That what?’

  ‘Some lump I could see in the sun, quite big and shiny.’

  Charles tossed the remark absently at her, no one was interested. ‘A cyst, I suppose. I didn’t notice.’

  ‘Like a bulging eye in the middle of his head. Or one of Moses’s horns growing.’

  Vusi had no need of ring-tabs any longer – he dropped his in his emptied beer can and gave it a shake, sounding a rattle for attention. ‘Kleynhans paid him fifteen rands a month. He worked for him for twelve years. When Kleynhans died, the daughter told the agent Klopper he could stay on without pay in that room in the yard until the place was sold. His son works at the brick-field and lives with his wife and kids with those other squatters near there. They’ve been chased off twice but they built their shack again. Since we came, the old man’s living with them. No job. No permission to look for work in town. Nowhere to go.’

  ‘Yes.’ Charles dragged all five fingers again and again through his beard. ‘Yes.’

  A habitation of resolve, secreted by their presence among one another, contained them again, the four of them: waiting. They were quiet, not subdued; strongly alive. There was no need to talk. After a while Vusi fetched his saxophone and it spoke, gently. There was a summer storm coming up, first the single finger of a tree’s branch paddling thick air, then the land expelling great breaths in gusts, common brown birds flinging themselves wildly, a raw, fresh-cut scent of rain falling somewhere else. So beautiful, the temperament of the earth. Waiting, they saw the rain, dangling over the pale spools that were the power station towers.

  Ms Dot Lamb, chairperson of the Residents’ Association of the suburb where, if an outlaw can be said to have taken up residence, this one seemed to have a base, since it kept returning there, requested an interview with the town councillor whom the residents had voted into office to protect their property and interests. The promise given by him produced no result – as if to show how little it felt itself threatened by the councillor, the creature ‘cleaned up’ as a resident put it, an entire bed of artichokes cultivated from imported seed for table use as an elegant first course. Ms Lamb called a meeting of the Association. She was a woman who got things done; the residents were people who wanted things done for them, without having to take the trouble themselves. It was she who had rallied them to contest the plan to build a home for spastic children among their houses. She had won (for them) the battle to stop toilets for blacks being built at the blacks’ suburban bus terminus, making a strong case that this convenience, far from promoting public decency, would merely encourage the number of blacks who gathered to drink among the natural flora of the koppies that was such a treasured feature of the suburb. Now these koppies were being used by an escaped ape as well. Was it for this that ratepayers had been notified of increases in property taxes envisaged for the coming year? Valuable pets, loved companions of children, had been killed. People feared to leave small children to play in their own gardens.

  The residents authorised Ms Lamb to take further steps. She wanted no more shilly-shallying with the so-called proper channels. She went straight to the local police station, kicked up a fuss, and actually got the superintendent to send two armed white policemen and a couple of black ones to mount a search along the ridge of koppies behind some of the finest homes in the suburb. They rounded up several illicit liquor sellers and arrested fifteen men without passes, but did not find what they had been instructed to.

  The SPCA protested that an animal should not be hunted and shot by the police, like a criminal. Zoo officials offered to try and dart it. If, as a number of people insisted, it was an ape, it would find a safe home in the new ape-house, where at 3 p.m. every day the inmates perform a tea party for the amusement of children of all races.

  Eddie went to the road and thumbed a lift in the African way, flagging a whole arm from waist level as if directing a motor race. He was wearing his Wild West jacket. Vusi and Charles were still asleep – some people can pass the time, waiting, by sleeping more – but Joy saw him go. Her hands tingled with anguish, as if she were going to be sick. She did not wake the others and did not know if she was doing what was right. She did not know whether, when they woke up, she would pretend she had not seen Eddie.

  Eddie got a lift with a black man in a firm’s panel van. They talked about soccer. He did not ask to be let down at the local dorp where Joy and Mrs Naas Klopper shopped. He went all the way – to Johannesburg.

  Eddie had nothing to leave at the entrance to a supermarket where you were asked to deposit your briefcase or carrier bag in return for a numbered disc. He did not uncouple a trolley from the train against the wall, or pick up a plastic basket. He walked the lanes as if at a vast exhibition, passing arsenals of canned fruit, yellow mosaics of pickles in jars, flat, round and oval cans of pilchards, sardines, anchovies, mussels in brine and tuna in cottonseed oil, bottles of sauces, aerosol cans of chocolate topping, bins of coffee beans, packets of rice and lentils, sacks of mealie-meal and sugar, pausing now and then, as if to read the name of the artist: Genuine Papadums, Poivre Vert de Madagascar – and then passing on to pet and poultry foods, detergents, packaged meat like cross-sections of viscera under a microscope, pots, Irish Coffee glasses, can openers, electric pizza-makers, saws, chisels, light bulbs, roundabout stands of women’s pantyhose, and greeting cards humorous, religious or sentimental. White women pushed small children or small dogs in the upper rack of trolleys. Black people turned over the packages of stewing meat. Other blacks, employees, wielded punches that printed prices on stocks they were replenishing. The piped music was interrupted by chimes and a voice regularly welcoming him (in his capacity as a shopper) and announcing today’s specials. At the record and tape bar he spent half an hour turning over the decks of bright neat tapes the way others did meat packs. There were no facilities for listening to tapes or records, but he knew all the groups and individuals recorded, and their familiar music sealed within. A supermarket wouldn’t have anything that hadn’t been reissued in cheap mass pressings – you’d need a record shop for really good, new stuff. Going through these was just looking up what hadn’t changed.

  He queued at one of the exits holding a set of transistor batteries and a snuffbox-sized tin of ointment he hadn’t seen since his mother used to put it on his sores as a kid. A mama ahead of him, turning to speak Setswana, at home here in this city in her slippers, outsize tweed skirt and nylon headscarf from some street-vendor’s selection, assumed his support, as one of her own, in an argument over change with the aloof almost-white cashier. From the stand beside him he took, as a tourist picks up a last postcard, one of the pairs of sunglasses hooked there.

  In the streets there were thousands like him. He crossed at traffic lights and walked pavements among them. Young ones loping in loose gangs of three or four, out of work or out of school, going nowhere. When you are that age, the city, where there is nothing for you, draws you from the townships, to which you always have to go back. Others, his own age, carrying their employers’ mail and packages to the post office, daringly shaving their motorbikes past traffic, delivering medicines and film, legal documents, orders of hamburgers. Older ones in those top brass peaked caps and military tunics with which white people strangely choose to dress the humblest of their employees – doormen and commissionaires – like their military heroes. The city was blacker than he remembered it. Down the west end of Jeppe and Bree Streets, the same long bus queues making an accompanying line of fruit skins and Coke cans in the gutters, the same Portuguese eating-house selling pap and
stew, the same taxi drivers using Diagonal Street as the backyard where they groomed their vehicles like proud racehorse owners, the same women crowded round the alley exit of the poultry wholesaler’s to buy sloppy pails of chicken guts. But in the white part of the city, where there were no street stalls but banks and insurance company blocks, landscaped malls, caterpillars of people being carried from level to level – into what used to be the white centre of the city, his own kind seemed to have flowed. It was Saturday and there were light-coloureds, painters and carpenters of the building trade, dressed in pastel safari shorts and jackets, straw hats with paisley bands, like the Afrikaners who grandfathered them. Black kids of respectable families had dazzling white socks halfway up their small legs. Lovely black girls tilted the balance of their backsides to counter the angle of the high-heeled sandals it was apparently fashionable this year to wear with jeans; the nails of their crooked toes and beautiful hands signalled deep red as they approached and passed him. All would have to go back to the places for blacks, when they had spent their money; but there was no white centre to the city any more (he had forgotten, in five years, that this was so, or it had happened in those five years). They came in and surged all over it, it lived off them and for them. The male office-cleaners, tiny, bare-chested figures looking down, in the wind and dust blown from the mine dumps, from the tops of skyscrapers where they washed their clothes and drank beer, must be able to see their own people far below, flowing all round the company headquarters of the white race.

  He spent a long time looking in windows filled with pocket calculators of all sizes and kinds, video equipment, cameras and the latest in walkabout tape players, which, as watches once had been, were being reduced to smaller and smaller format. Inside a shop he had this marvellous precision of workmanship demonstrated to him by a young Portuguese who probably had fled to this country from black rule in Mozambique just about the same time as Eddie had fled from his home, here in Johannesburg, eluding the political police from the handsome building with touches of blue paint, John Vorster Square, a few blocks from the shop in which he was now trying on headphones. ‘S’wonderful, ’ey? You don’t ’ardly feel them, they so light.’ The young Portuguese was willing to show every feature of each shape, size and model. When Eddie left without ‘making up his mind’, he gave Eddie a card with a name written large and curly below the shop’s printed title – Manuel. ‘H’ask for me, I’ll look after you.’

  In an outfitter’s Eddie was shown a range of casual trousers by an Indian employed there. ‘This’s what all the young chaps are wearing, man. Bright colours. What are you? Twenty-eight?’ He sized up Eddie’s waist with a frisker’s glance. He admired Eddie’s jacket: that certainly wasn’t locally made! When Eddie didn’t see anything he liked, he was reassured: ‘Just look in next week, say, after Tuesday. We getting fabulous new stuff all the time. Whenever you passing . . .’

  He roamed again towards the west end, to the queues from which he could catch a bus to get him part of his way back. He bought a carton of curried chicken and ate as he went along. Outside a white men’s bar a black girl singled him out with a sidling look, and approached. He smiled and walked on: no thanks, sisi. With the prostitute’s eye for the stranger in town, she was the only one in the city to recognise him: someone set apart in the crowd of his own kind from which he appeared indistinguishable.

  Stanley Dobrow entered his photograph for the ‘Picture of The Year’ competition held by a morning paper.

  Old Grahame Fraser-Smith – the ‘old’ was an epithet of comradeliness on the part of his colleagues, he was only forty-eight – got the idea in his head that although short-sighted, he had seen into the eyes of the creature. In the operating theatre, during those intervals between putting together broken faces with a human skill and ingenuity more miraculous than God’s making of a woman out of a man’s rib, he told the story differently, now. It seemed to him that as he bent down for the golf ball, he saw the creature bend first, just as he was doing, but farther off. And they looked at each other. You know how arresting eyes can be? It was hardly necessary to point this out where everyone around him was reduced to eyes above masks. No, true, he couldn’t describe the body, certainly not the gait, as van Gelder insisted he could. Yet the eyes – you know how it is sometimes, in a room full of people, you see really only one person, you look into that pair of eyes and it’s as if you are face to face, alone, with that person? It was like suddenly meeting someone seen many times on a photograph; or someone he’d been told about as a child; or someone people had been telling one another about for generations. He stopped there. He didn’t want the assisting surgeons, anaesthetist, nurses, the medical students who came to watch the beauty of his work (about which he was genuinely modest) to reduce that encounter to something fanciful, and therefore funny. But if van Gelder was a bone man, so was he, a Hamlet who had contemplated and reconstructed with his own hands the living maxillo-facial structure of a thousand Yoricks. To himself he secretly continued: he had looked back into a consciousness from which part of his own came. There were claims from within oneself that could materialise only in these unsought ways, in apparently trivial or fortuitous happenings that could be felt but not understood. He thought of the experience as some sort of slip in the engagement of the cogs of time.

  Eddie was there before dark.

  Vusi and Charles were playing chess and Joy was burning rubbish in the front garden. So she was first to see him come as she was first to know he had gone. She had a broken branch and went on poking at whatever was burning until he had to pass her on his way up to the house. She put up a folded hand with her usual effacing gesture, smiling, not aware that she smeared the cobweb of flying ashes that had settled on her forehead. ‘Hello.’

  If she wouldn’t ask any questions, he would.

  Eddie stopped. ‘What’s that for?’

  She was better-looking with the waves of flame melting the narrow definitions of her face, colouring and rounding it. ‘A rat came into the bathroom. They’re breeding in that pile of junk we threw out of the shed. I had to lug everything round here.’

  He nodded. He had been away, but at once was together with her, with the others, again, in the knowledge that no fire could be made near what was behind the new garage door.

  He went on to the house.

  They must have heard him talking to Joy. They must have decided to talk it out calmly, but Charles struggled up from under his own self-control, the chessmen rolled over the floor. ‘Are you bloody mad?’ He was gone from the room.

  Vusi did not seem to see Charles; opened his mouth dryly and closed it again.

  Eddie dribbled one of the chessmen with the toe of his running shoe. He went out to the kitchen, and came back with a beer. Charles was there, gathering up the chessmen.

  The release of gas from the beer can as he pierced it was like an opening exclamation from Eddie. ‘Well, nothing happened. I went to town, I’m back.’

  Vusi was silent, withholding his attention.

  Charles had his big body safely chained down on a stool. ‘I’m sorry. But it’s clear you know what you did, what risk you took for us all.’

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about. Nothing happened.’ Eddie spoke to Vusi. He had to reach Vusi. It was Vusi to whom they were all responsible, even in collective responsibility; Vusi, not Charles, to whom Joy had had to say she had seen Eddie take a lift, on the road, early in the morning. ‘I didn’t go to see anyone. You can believe that.’

  Vusi gave a slow blink to dismiss any suggestion of mistrust. Eddie’s presence was acknowledged. ‘That’s not the question, man. You could have been picked up.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t.’

  Joy came in and saw they were not quarrelling; it was no more possible for them to dare quarrel than for her to have made her bonfire near the shed. Discipline was the molecular pattern that attracted them back to their particular association. If Eddie had been picked up, even if he had not been recognised as a banned exil
e who had infiltrated, and had got away with being jailed as an ordinary pass-offender (the papers he had been provided with described him as a farm labourer and did not permit him to look for work in an urban area), the pattern would have been distorted. Vusi could not function without Eddie, Eddie and Vusi without Charles and Joy, Charles and Joy without Eddie and Vusi. The entity reconstituted itself irresistibly, there among the sofa covered with the conch-design cloth, the armchair that had become Vusi’s, the fake ox-wagon wheel with its fly-haloed pink hats; there was no sending it flying apart, from within, by attacking (with the sort of open reproaches any ordinary relationship would withstand) the component – Eddie – that was once more in place, at the Kleynhans place.

  The white pair later heard Vusi talking for a long time in his and Eddie’s language in the second bedroom. Each made a mental translation, according to what they themselves would have been saying to Eddie, of what Vusi would be saying in the low cadence that seemed to vibrate the thin walls of the house like some swarm settled under the tin roof. Charles was giving him the hell he couldn’t, aloud; above all, how could the kid Eddie risk Vusi, Vusi who had been operational before, who knew his job, who was needed to stay alive and had managed to survive four times the near certainty of imprisonment and death his job carried. Joy was asking why: if Eddie really knew why he was here – the reasons of his own life, of the lives of all his people for generations – then how could he have an impulse to drop back into the meek or loudmouth compliance of the streets, still under that same magisterial authority of someone’s long-dead white grandfather? Poor Eddie. It could only be because he had not understood properly why he had to be here and nowhere else; not taking advantage of slowly evolving opportunities to advance himself in the black business community, or to avail himself, at newly established technikons for blacks, of what, after all, were necessary skills for the service of his people, or to join the elite of black doctors allowed to practise only in black areas or black lawyers barred from taking chambers in white areas where the courts were. She could testify, in herself. She would not have been here if she had not found her own re-education, after the school where she had sung for God to save white South Africa. Without that re-education she would not have come to know for herself, for certain, that she could not now be bearing classified children (white) while living in a white suburb like that of the house with a view where she had grown up. She could not be anywhere but on the Kleynhans plot with a view of the power station.