Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,154

were black soldiers on duty but they woke the white man. It was the one who knew his name, his clan, his village, the way these modern white men were taught. He seemed to know at once why the chief had come; frowning in concentration to grasp details, his mouth was open in a smile and the point of his tongue curled touching at back teeth the way a man will verify facts one by one on his fingers. ‘How many?’

‘Six or ten or – but sometimes it’s only, say, three or one . . . I don’t know. One is here, he’s gone; they come again.’

‘They take food, they sleep, and off. Yes. They make the people give them what they want, that’s it, eh? And you know who it is who hides them – who shows them where to sleep – of course you know.’

The chief sat on one of the chairs in that place, the army’s place, and the white soldier was standing. ‘Who is it—’ the chief was having difficulty in saying what he wanted in English, he had the feeling it was not coming out as he had meant nor being understood as he had expected. ‘I can’t know who is it’ – a hand moved restlessly, he held a breath and released it – ‘in the village there’s many, plenty people. If it’s this one or this one—’ He stopped, shaking his head with a reminder to the white man of his authority, which the white soldier was quick to placate.

‘Of course. Never mind. They frighten the people; the people can’t say no. They kill people who say no, eh; cut their ears off, you know that? Tear away their lips. Don’t you see the pictures in the papers?’

‘We never saw it. I heard the government say on the radio.’

‘They’re still drinking . . . How long – an hour ago?’

The white soldier checked with a look the other men, whose stance had changed to that of bodies ready to break into movement: grab weapons, run, fling themselves at the Land Rovers guarded in the dark outside. He picked up the telephone receiver but blocked the mouthpiece as if it were someone about to make an objection. ‘Chief, I’ll be with you in a moment. Take him to the duty room and make coffee. Just wait—’ he leant his full reach towards a drawer in a cabinet on the left of the desk and, scrabbling to get it open, took out a half-full bottle of brandy. Behind the chief’s back he gestured the bottle towards the chief, and a black soldier jumped obediently to take it.

The chief went to a cousin’s house in a village the other side of the army post later that night. He said he had been to a beer-drink and could not ride home because of the white men’s curfew.

The white soldier had instructed that he should not be in his own village when the arrests were made so that he could not be connected with these and would not be in danger of having his ears cut off for taking heed of what the government wanted of him, or having his lips mutilated for what he had told.

His cousin gave him blankets. He slept in a hut with her father. The deaf old man was aware neither that he had come nor was leaving so early that last night’s moon, the size of the bicycle’s reflector, was still shiny in the sky. The bicycle rode up on spring-hares without disturbing them, in the forest; there was a stink of jackal-fouling still sharp on the dew. Smoke already marked his village; early cooking fires were lit. Then he saw that the smoke, the black particles spindling at his face, were not from cooking fires. Instead of going faster as he pumped his feet against the weight of sand the bicycle seemed to slow along with his mind, to find in each revolution of its wheels the countersurge: to stop; not go on. But there was no way not to reach what he found. The planes only children bothered to look up at any longer had come in the night and dropped something terrible and alive that no one could have read or heard about enough to be sufficiently afraid of. He saw first a bloody kaross, a dog caught on the roots of an upturned tree. The earth under the village seemed to have burst open and flung away what