Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,124

the men in their uniforms carried a stretcher over people’s heads and then lifted the woman aboard. Her face was purplish as cold hands on a winter morning and her legs stuck out. The boys were part of the entourage that followed her to the ambulance, Matt progressing with sweeping hops, on bended knee, like a Russian dancer, in order to get the supine body in focus at an upward angle.

When it was all over, they went back to the Crêperie to relate the sensational story to the family; but they had not been even interested enough to stay, and had gone home to the villa. ‘It’ll be really something for you to show them down in Africa!’ said Matt. He was using his Minox that afternoon, and he promised that when the films were developed, he would have copies made for Clive. ‘Darn it, we’ll have to wait until my parents take the films to Nice – you can’t get them developed up here. And they only go in on Wednesdays.’

‘But I’ll be gone by then,’ said Clive suddenly.

‘Gone? Back to Africa?’ All the distance fell between them as they stood head-to-head jostled by the people in the village street, all the distance of the centuries when the continent was a blank outline on the maps, as well as the distance of miles. ‘You mean you’ll be back in Africa?’

Clive’s box camera went into his cupboard along with the other souvenirs of Europe that seemed to have shed their evocation when they were unpacked amid the fresh, powerful familiarity of home. He boasted a little, the first day of the new term at school, about the places he had been to; but within a few weeks, when cities and palaces that he had seen for himself were spoken of in history or geography classes, he did not mention that he had visited them and, in fact, the textbook illustrations and descriptions did not seem to be those of anything he knew. One day he searched for his camera to take to a sports meeting, and found an exposed film in it. When it was developed, there were the pictures of the cats. He turned them this way up and that, to make out the thin, feral shapes on cobblestones and the disappearing blurs round the blackness of archways. There was also the picture of the American boy, Matt, a slim boy with knees made big out of focus, looking – at once suspicious and bright – from under his uncut hair.

The family crowded round to see, smiling, filled with pangs for what the holiday was and was not, while it lasted.

‘The Time-Life man himself!’

‘Poor old Matt – what was his other name?’

‘You ought to send it to him,’ said the mother. ‘You’ve got the address? Aren’t you going to keep in touch?’

But there was no address. The boy Matt had no street, house, house in a street, room in a house like the one they were in. ‘America,’ Clive said, ‘he’s in America.’

Rain-Queen

We were living in the Congo at the time; I was nineteen. It must have been my twentieth birthday we had at the Au Relais, with the Gattis, M. Niewenhuys and my father’s site manager. My father was building a road from Elisabethville to Tshombe’s residence, a road for processions and motorcades. It’s Lubumbashi now, and Tshombe’s dead in exile. But at that time there was plenty of money around and my father was brought from South Africa with a free hand to recruit engineers from anywhere he liked; the Gattis were Italian, and then there was a young Swede. I didn’t want to leave Johannesburg because of my boyfriend, Alan, but my mother didn’t like the idea of leaving me behind, because of him. She said to me, ‘Quite honestly, I think it’s putting too much temptation in a young girl’s way. I’d have no one to blame but myself.’ I was very young for my age, then, and I gave in.

There wasn’t much for me to do in E’ville. I was taken up by some young Belgian married women who were only a few years older than I was. I had coffee with them in town in the mornings, and played with their babies. My mother begged them to speak French to me; she didn’t want the six months there to be a complete waste. One of them taught me how to make a chocolate mousse, and I made myself a dress under the supervision