Life Times

by Nadine Gordimer

  The Prime Minister had been scheduled to make a major speech in a farming constituency where a by-election was to be held. Instead of having to counter dissatisfaction with his agricultural policy, he was able to call upon support from all sections of the community to meet the threat from beyond our borders that was always ready to strike at our country. He did not need to, nor did he mention this latest attack on its vitals, which had happened only three days before the speech; his face, composed somewhere between a funeral and a stryddag, was enough to put complaints about beef and maize prices to shame.

  The release of official statements lags behind what people in the know come to know. A good journalist must have his contacts in both the regular police force and the security police. A manhunt was on, routine roadblocks and a close watch on all airports and border posts were being maintained: there was to be no further information supplied to the public while important leads were being followed. The important leads – everyone knew what those were. Another routine in such cases: a number of people, mostly blacks, had been detained even more promptly than normal power supplies could be restored, and were under interrogation, day after day, night after night, during which a name extorted by an agony of fear and solitude, and if that didn’t bring results, by the infliction of physical pain, might or might not be that of someone who would attempt to blow up a power station. John Vorster Square and its suburban and rural annexes were working at optimum capacity. But Sergeant Marais Chapman had been taken off interrogation duty and sent with a couple of black security men to question people within a cordon of the area in which the towers of the power station were the veld landmark. One of the good journalists knew, without being able to publish a word in the meantime (the story was on file) that the police had been to the Indian at the store, who did not recognise any of the photographs they showed him, and that they had visited all plots and farms, questioning black labourers. It was in the course of these visits that they found an empty house, a deserted yard, at Plot 185 Koppiesdrif, where an old man with some story about being there to weed his mealie patch told them this was Baas Kleynhans’s place but the oubaas was dead and the boys that worked there now, they had gone away two weeks ago, and the white people who were living in the house, last week he saw the missus but now this time when he came to weed his mealies, they were gone, too. The old man gave the name of the baas who looked after the farm now Baas Kleynhans was dead. So Naas Klopper – out of nowhere! – found the police sitting in Klopper’s Eiendoms Beperk, waiting to ask what he could tell them about the Kleynhans place.

  The journalist interviewed him shortly after. He wanted to talk to Klopper’s wife, as well, because Klopper let slip that the white couple had ‘taken us for a ride’, they’d even had (the refreshment grew in proportion to the deception) a meal at the house – his wife had felt sorry for the girl, who was pregnant. But Mrs Naas did not want to give an interview to the English press; they would always twist in a nasty way something innocent that Afrikaners said. She did, however, talk to a nice young man from one of the Afrikaans papers, serving him coffee and those very same buttermilk rusks she’d baked and taken along to the young couple just after they’d moved in. She described again, as she had to the police, what the black looked like who had come from the yard, for a moment, with a tool or something (she couldn’t quite remember) in his hand. Just like any other black – young, wearing jeans that were a bit smart, yes, for a farm boy. He hadn’t said anything. The white girl hadn’t spoken to him. But she was flustered when Mrs Naas – out of kindness, that’s all, the girl said she was a foreigner – remarked she hoped the boy wasn’t some loafer who’d come to the back door. Rosser their name was. They seemed such polite young people. Whenever she got to that point in her story, Mrs Naas was stopped by a long quavering sigh, as if somebody had caught her by the throat. She and whomever she was telling the tale to would look at one another in silence a moment; the journalist was not excepted. Something alien was burning slowly, like a stick of incense fuming in this room, Mrs Naas’s split-level lounge, which had been so lovingly constructed, the slasto fireplace chosen stone by stone by Naas himself, the beasts whose skins covered the bar-stools shot by him, the tapestry made stitch by stitch by Mrs Naas in security against the rural poverty of the past and in certainty that these objects and artefacts were what civilisation is.

  Mrs Naas – being a woman, being artistic – notices things more than a man does, Naas Klopper advised the police. It was Mrs Naas’s description of the girl and the young man that they took back to compare with their files and photographs at John Vorster, and to use in the interrogations that, if they couldn’t always wring words from the obdurate (and sometimes you couldn’t get a sound out of these people, no matter what you did to them) might reveal an involuntary change of expression that made it worthwhile to press on for recognition, names, evidence of collusion. So it was the police had in their files, the journalist had in his article (biding its time for a Sunday front page), a description of the wanted white couple as a blond bearded man in his twenties and a young pregnant woman. The journalist had no description of any blacks who had taken part in the sabotage attack, although it was known that the actual job was done by blacks. It was the involvement of whites that was the newsworthy angle; one white revolutionary was worth twenty blacks.

  If it was detrimental to state security to allow publication of any details about the saboteurs, it was useful to use certain details of the attack to impress upon the public evidence of what threatened them. Let State Information pick up the saboteurs’ weapons and hold these at citizens’ heads: that’s the way to shut any big mouths asking awkward questions about why they had come to be threatened – everyone’d be quick enough to agree, then, they must give the Prime Minister, to save their skins, anything he demanded. A photograph of a cache of arms was released to all newspapers; AKM assault rifles, limpet mines with detonators and timing devices of the type it had been established had blown up part of the power station, defensive and offensive hand grenades with detonators, several hundred rounds of ammunition. Some Dragonov sniper rifles, actually from a different, earlier cache, were thrown in for added effect, as a piece of greenery gives the final touch to a floral arrangement. The sites on which these arms were discovered were not shown, but it was stated that some had been buried in the veld at a hideout among bushes where the saboteurs appeared to have lived prior to the attack, and some had been stored in the garage of a house on a plot. The ‘reinforced’ outhouse was thought to be an arsenal on which more than one group of saboteurs had drawn. A biscuit tin displayed in a corner of the photograph contained ammunition. When Mrs Naas Klopper saw it she gave a cry of recognition. There was the child with the puppy and the roses; her own biscuit tin, in which she had made the offering of rusks.

  A baboon has been found dead in a lane.

  The stench of decay led some children to it while they were roller skating. Its right arm was shattered and its fur tarred with blackened blood. Now somebody got a photograph of it, before the Baca municipal street-cleaners’ gang were persuaded by a fifty-cent bonsella to take the carcass away on Monday morning.

  Nobody wants to publish the photograph. The dead baboon was found the Sunday an attempt was made to blow up the power station. The sabotage attack filled the newspapers and has given people other preoccupations; after all, some of the suburbs the creature had made uneasy were without electricity for eighteen hours.

  It has been identified as a young, full-grown, male Chacma baboon. Only a baboon, after all; not an orang-outan, not a chimpanzee – just a native species.

  The Kleynhans Place has now been photographed by newspapermen for papers published in English, Afrikaans and Zulu for specific readerships, black, white and in-between, and for the international press. It has acquired a capital ‘P’ to distinguish its ominous status as a proper noun, the name of a threat within the midst of the community of law and order. If the Kleynhans Place can exist, undetected, a farming plot li
ke any other on the books of Klopper’s Eiendoms Beperk, what is left of the old, secure life?

  Investigating the Kleynhans Place attack the police found two mattresses on the floor in the house, as well as two beds; old newspapers going back many weeks to that story about a monkey seen by some kids while they were swimming. Nothing there to work on. The only thing the white couple seemed to have forgotten was a home-made musical instrument, a sort of saxophone. (That was not ranged along with the exhibit of arms in the photograph released by the Security Chief to the press.) The Security Branch has searched its files for a political suspect known to have been a former musician. It is obvious the instrument was made by a black – a certain naive ingenuity, the kind of thing blacks manage to put together out of bits of junk in a mine compound or while serving long prison sentences. Contact with the Prisons Department in charge of Robben Island has brought the information that similar objects are sometimes made by the long-term politicals held there. This particular piece of work incorporated tin rings from beer cans (plenty of those found in the kitchen) and cartridges that match those in the cache of live ammunition.

  Quite early on in their investigations the police released the information that one of the four people – two whites and two blacks – it has been established were responsible for the Kleynhans Place attack, was apprehended on the Swaziland border and killed in a shoot-out with the police. No policeman was injured in this incident. A guard at the power station lost two fingers but no other personnel were injured by the explosion, and there was no loss of life among personnel or public. The old man who had visited the Kleynhans Place to watch the progress of his mealie patch was brought to the police mortuary to look at the corpse of the dead black man. The face was in a state to be recognised although there wasn’t much left of the body. He identified the face as that of one of the farm boys who had worked for the white missus he had seen on the Kleynhans Place; this old man was therefore the key link in the investigation, proving beyond doubt that the white couple had set up house for the purpose of providing cover and a safe place for all four to plan the attack, and to store the weapons and ammunition required. (Mr Naas Klopper has testified that an open shed had been audaciously turned into a magazine with a steel door.) The two black men posed as farm labourers until a few days before the attack, when they moved to an old, abandoned mine-working near the power station. Blankets, the remains of fast-food packets, marked their occupation out there in the veld.

  Nobody knows who the saboteurs, alive or dead, really are. There are names, yes – as the investigation has proceeded, as the interrogations at John Vorster yield results, there have been names. On the wrist of the dead man there was a cheap chain bracelet with a small plaque, engraved ‘Gende’, and it has been established that this was one of the names of a man known as ‘Eddie’, ‘Maxwell’ or ‘David Koza’. He had been among thousands detained in the riots of ‘76, as a schoolboy. He had left the country uncounted, when released; no one knew when he had gone and no one knows when he came back.

  The white pair were not married. There is no such couple as Mr and Mrs Charles Rosser, who sat there shyly in Mrs Naas’s lovely home. The Afrikaans first name, ‘Anna’, was not the girl’s name. A Mr and Mrs Watson, living quietly in Port Elizabeth, who haven’t seen her for years – she changed ‘out of all recognition’ through political views they couldn’t tolerate – named her twenty-nine years ago ‘for joy’ at the birth of a little daughter. So far as they are aware she has never been to Australia. ‘Charles’ was christened Winston Derocher – one of those sentimental slips these politicals make, eh, coming as close as to call himself ‘Rosser’, when he must have known informants in England would supply John Vorster with a file on him!

  The second black man, the survivor, has been identified as Zachariah Makakune, also know as Sidney Tluli. He is believed to have infiltrated from exile several times, and to have been responsible for other acts of sabotage, none of which involved loss of life, before the Kleynhans Place attack. But his luck must run out some day; he will kill or be killed. It was hoped that he had died in one of the South African Defence Force’s attacks over the borders on African National Congress men given asylum in neighbouring countries, but it was discovered that the Defence Force was misinformed; he had moved house, and it was new tenants, a building worker and his family, citizens of that country who had never been beyond its borders, who had been machine-gunned in their beds in his place.

  So nobody really knows who he was, the one who died after the Kleynhans Place attack, nor whom they believed themselves to be, the three who survived and disappeared. Nobody really knows which names mark the identity each has accepted within himself. And even this is not known fully to himself: all that brought him to this pass; this place, this time, this identity he feels. ‘Charles’, sometime lover of Joy, ‘Charlie’, brother of ‘Vusi’ and ‘Eddie’ – Winston Derocher, given his father’s hero’s name as first name, does not know that his distant French ancestor, de Rocher, founding a family too confused by the linguistic and cultural exchanges of treks and intermarriage to keep records, was a missionary who, like himself, lived by assertion of brotherhood – another kind – outside the narrow community of his skin. ‘Vusi’ does not know that the rotgut liquor bottle he found with the trade name Hatherley Distillery came from Die Eerste Fabriek, approved by President Paul Kruger, the prototype factory on the veld where ‘Vusi’s’ own great-grandfather worked for the little money that was to become the customary level of wages for blacks, when the mining camp was proclaimed a town, a city, a great industrial complex.

  Dr Grahame Fraser-Smith, looking back in fancy into the eyes of hominid evolution on a golf course, was ignorant of a more recent stage that had gone into his making. He doesn’t know he is descended, only three human generations back, from a housemaid, Maisie McCulloch, who was imported by a mining magnate to empty the slops in a late Victorian colonial mansion now declared a national monument, and who left this position to be taken over by blacks, herself opening a brothel for all races in Jeppe Street.

  No one has ever found out who let the baboon loose.

  The sacred member of the ape family, the work of art in the municipal art gallery, has both a known and a hidden provenance. It is authenticated as an eighteenth-century European copy of a seventh-century statue from Māllapuram, India. The old lady who donated it had migrated to South Africa to escape racial persecution in Europe. She was not aware of the rarity of her gift, and thought she was making a display of generous patronage of the arts without sacrificing anything valuable in the private cache of European culture she had saved, along with her own life, from destruction.

  The mine-working where Eddie and Vusi hid, that Charles identified as belonging to the turn of the nineteenth century, is in fact far, far older. It goes back further than anything in conventional or alternative history, or even oral tradition, back to the human presences who people anthropology and archaeology, to the hands that shaped the objects or fired the charcoal which may be subjected to carbon tests. No one knows that with the brief occupation of Vusi and Eddie, and the terrible tools that were all they had to work with, a circle was closed; because before the gold-rush prospectors of the 1890s, centuries before time was measured, here, in such units, there was an ancient mine-working out there, and metals precious to men were discovered, dug and smelted, for themselves, by black men.

  Jump

  Once Upon a Time

  Someone has written to ask me to contribute to an anthology of stories for children. I reply that I don’t write children’s stories; and he writes back that at a recent congress/book fair/seminar a certain novelist said every writer ought to write at least one story for children. I think of sending a postcard saying I don’t accept that I ‘ought’ to write anything.

  And then last night I woke up – or rather was wakened without knowing what had roused me.

  A voice in the echo chamber of the subconscious?

  A sound.

&n
bsp; A creaking of the kind made by the weight carried by one foot after another along a wooden floor. I listened. I felt the apertures of my ears distend with concentration. Again: the creaking. I was waiting for it; waiting to hear if it indicated that feet were moving from room to room, coming up the passage – to my door. I have no burglar bars, no gun under the pillow, but I have the same fears as people who do take these precautions, and my window panes are thin as rime, could shatter like a wineglass. A woman was murdered (how do they put it) in broad daylight in a house two blocks away, last year, and the fierce dogs who guarded an old widower and his collection of antique clocks were strangled before he was knifed by a casual labourer he had dismissed without pay.

  I was staring at the door, making it out in my mind rather than seeing it, in the dark. I lay quite still – a victim already – but the arrhythmia of my heart was fleeing, knocking this way and that against its body-cage. How finely tuned the senses are, just out of rest, sleep! I could never listen intently as that in the distractions of the day; I was reading every faintest sound, identifying and classifying its possible threat.

  But I learnt that I was to be neither threatened nor spared. There was no human weight pressing on the boards, the creaking was a buckling, an epicentre of stress. I was in it. The house that surrounds me while I sleep is built on undermined ground; far beneath my bed, the floor, the house’s foundations, the stopes and passages of gold mines have hollowed the rock, and when some face trembles, detaches and falls, three thousand feet below, the whole house shifts slightly, bringing uneasy strain to the balance and counterbalance of brick, cement, wood and glass that hold it as a structure around me. The misbeats of my heart tailed off like the last muffled flourishes on one of the wooden xylophones made by the Chopi and Tsonga migrant miners who might have been down there, under me in the earth at that moment. The stope where the fall was could have been disused, dripping water from its ruptured veins; or men might now be interred there in the most profound of tombs.