One winter night in that year a pipe burst, flooding outside Vera’s annexe, and she put her leather jacket over pyjamas and went to turn off the main water control in the yard. The tap was tight with chlorine deposits and would not budge in hands that became clumsy with cold. She quietly entered the house. Vera always had access, with a second set of keys Zeph had given her; she kept an eye on the house while he was away on business trips or spent a few days with his family in Odensville. The keys were also a precaution Zeph insisted on for her safety; if anything or anyone threatened her, a woman alone, she could come to him. The disposition of rooms in his house was familiar under her hands in the dark. She would not disturb him by turning on lights. She was making her way without a creak of floor-boards or any contact with objects to the cupboard in the passage between his bedroom and the bathroom where she knew she would find pliers.
Without any awareness of a shape darker than the darkness she came into contact with a warm soft body.
Breathing, heartbeats.
Once she had picked up an injured bird and felt a living substance like that.
Through her open jacket this one was against her, breasts against breasts, belly against belly; each was afraid to draw away because this would confirm to the other that there really had been a presence, not an illusion out of the old unknown of darkness that takes over even in the protection of a locked house. Vera was conscious of the metal tool in her hand, as if she really were some intruder ready to strike. For a few seconds, maybe, she and the girl were tenderly fused in the sap-scent of semen that came from her. Then Vera backed away, and the girl turned and ran on bare feet to his bedroom where the unlatched door let her return without a sound.
Vera came out into the biting ebony-blue of winter air as if she dived into the delicious shock of it. She turned off the tap with the satisfaction of a woman performing a workman-like task. Instead of at once entering her annexe she went into the garden, the jacket zipped closed over live warmth. Cold seared her lips and eyelids; frosted the arrangement of two chairs and table; everything stripped. Not a leaf on the scoured smooth limbs of the trees, and the bushes like tangled wire; dried palm fronds stiff as her fingers. A thick trail of smashed ice crackling light, stars blinded her as she let her head dip back; under the swing of the sky she stood, feet planted, on the axis of the night world. Vera walked there, for a while. And then took up her way, breath scrolling out, a signature before her.
Footnotes
1 Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging. A white militant right-wing resistance movement.
2 Transvaal Provincial Administration.
3 Literally ‘auntie’ in Afrikaans. Originally respectful, became a way of referring disparagingly to any middle-aged or old woman.
4 Azanian People’s Liberation Army.
5 Flag of the old Transvaal Boer Republic.
A Note on the Author
Nadine Gordimer’s recent books are My Son’s Story (1990) and Jump and Other Stories (1991). She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. She lives in Johannesburg.
By the Same Author
NOVELS
The Lying Days / A World of Strangers / Occasion for Loving
The Late Bourgeois World / A Guest of Honour
The Conservationist / Burger’s Daughter / July’s People
A Sport of Nature / My Son’s Story / None to Accompany Me
The House Gun / The Pickup / Get a Life / No Time Like the Present
STORY COLLECTIONS
The Soft Voice of the Serpent / Six Feet of the Country
Friday’s Footprint / Not for Publication
Livingstone’s Companions
A Soldier’s Embrace / Something Out There
Jump / Loot / Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black / Life Times
ESSAYS
The Black Interpreters / On the Mines (with David Goldblatt)
Lifetimes under Apartheid (with David Goldblatt)
The Essential Gesture — Writing, Politics and Places (edited by Stephen Clingman)
Writing and Being
Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century
Telling Times: Writing and Living, 1954–2008
EDITOR, CONTRIBUTOR
Telling Tales
First published in Great Britain 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Felix Licensing, B.V.
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
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