Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,140

clear she had committed perjury either at this trial or at the preparatory examination. There was the suggestion in the mind of the court that she might be an accomplice in the crime; but, again, insufficient proof.

The judge commended the honourable behaviour of the husband (sitting in court in a brown-and-yellow-quartered golf cap bought for Sundays) who had not rejected his wife and had ‘even provided clothes for the unfortunate infant out of his slender means’.

The verdict on the accused was ‘not guilty’.

The young white man refused to accept the congratulations of press and public and left the court with his mother’s raincoat shielding his face from photographers. His father said to the press, ‘I will try and carry on as best I can to hold up my head in the district.’

Interviewed by the Sunday papers, who spelled her name in a variety of ways, the black girl, speaking in her own language, was quoted beneath her photograph: ‘It was a thing of our childhood, we don’t see each other any more.’

A Soldier’s Embrace

The day the ceasefire was signed she was caught in a crowd. Peasant boys from Europe who had made up the colonial army and freedom fighters whose column had marched into town were staggering about together outside the barracks, not three blocks from her house in whose rooms, for ten years, she had heard the blurred parade-ground bellow of colonial troops being trained to kill and be killed.

The men weren’t drunk. They linked and swayed across the street; because all that had come to a stop, everything had to come to a stop: they surrounded cars, bicycles, vans, nannies with children, women with loaves of bread or basins of mangoes on their heads, a road gang with picks and shovels, a Coca-Cola truck, an old man with a barrow who bought bottles and bones. They were grinning and laughing in amazement. That it could be: there they were, bumping into each other’s bodies in joy, looking into each other’s rough faces, all eyes crescent-shaped, brimming greeting. The words were in languages not mutually comprehensible, but the cries were new, a whooping and crowing all understood. She was bumped and jostled and she let go, stopped trying to move in any self-determined direction. There were two soldiers in front of her, blocking her off by their clumsy embrace (how do you do it, how do you do what you’ve never done before) and the embrace opened like a door and took her in – a pink hand with bitten nails grasping her right arm, a black hand with a big-dialled watch and thong bracelet pulling at her left elbow. Their three heads collided gaily, musk of sweat and tang of strong sweet soap clapped a mask to her nose and mouth. They all gasped with delicious shock. They were saying things to each other. She put up an arm round each neck, the rough pile of an army haircut on one side, the soft negro hair on the other, and kissed them both on the cheek. The embrace broke. The crowd wove her away behind backs, arms, jogging heads; she was returned to and took up the will of her direction again – she was walking home from the post office, where she had just sent a telegram to relatives abroad: ALL CALM DON’T WORRY.

The lawyer came back early from his offices because the courts were not sitting although the official celebration holiday was not until next day. He described to his wife the rally before the Town Hall, which he had watched from the office-building balcony. One of the guerrilla leaders (not the most important; he on whose head the biggest price had been laid would not venture so soon and deep into the territory so newly won) had spoken for two hours from the balcony of the Town Hall. ‘Brilliant. Their jaws dropped. Brilliant. They’ve never heard anything on that level: precise, reasoned – none of them would ever have believed it possible, out of the bush. You should have seen de Poorteer’s face. He’d like to be able to get up and open his mouth like that. And be listened to like that . . .’ The Governor’s handicap did not even bring the sympathy accorded to a stammer; he paused and gulped between words. The blacks had always used a portmanteau name for him that meant the-crane-who-is-trying-to-swallow-the-bullfrog.

One of the members of the black underground organisation that could now come out in brass-band support of