Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,172

to remind me I once said, in a temper, to a useless assistant coughing all over the shop (you should have had to deal with those lazy goyim), he ought to die, the sick dog. Did I know you would get tuberculosis, too? It wasn’t our fault your lungs rotted. I tried to expand your chest when you were little, teaching you to swim; you should never have moved out of your own home, the care of your parents, to that rat-hole in the Schönbornpalais. And the hovel in Berlin . . . We had some good times, didn’t we? Franz? When we had beer and sausages after the swimming lessons? At least you remembered the beer and sausages, when you were dying.

One more thing. It chokes me, I have to say it. I know you’ll never answer. You once wrote ‘Speech is possible only where one wants to lie.’ You were too ultra-sensitive to speak to us, Franz. You kept silence, with the truth: those playing a game of cards, turning in bed on the other side of the wall – it was the sound of live people you didn’t like. Your revenge, that you were too cowardly to take in life, you’ve taken here. We can’t lie peacefully in our graves; dug up, unwrapped from our shrouds by your fame. To desecrate your parents’ grave as well as their bed, aren’t you ashamed? Aren’t you ashamed – now? Well, what’s the use of quarrelling. We lie together in the same grave – you, your mother and I. We’ve ended up as we always should have been, united. Rest in peace, my son. I wish you had let me.

Your father,

Hermann Kafka

Something Out There

Stanley Dobrow, using the Canonball Sureshot, one of three cameras he was given for his barmitzvah, photographed it. He did. I promise you, he said – as children adjure integrity by pledging to the future something that has already happened. His friends Hilton and Sharon also saw it: Stanley jacked himself from the pool, ran through the house leaving wet footprints all the way up the new stair carpet, and fetched the Canonball Sureshot.

The thrashing together of two tree tops – that was all that came out.

When other people claimed to have seen it – or another one like it: there were reports from other suburbs, quite far away – and someone’s beautiful Persian tabby and someone else’s fourteen-year-old dachshund were found mauled and dead, Stanley’s father believed him and phoned a newspaper to report his son’s witness. Predator At Large In Plush Suburbs was the headline tried out by a university graduate newly hired as a sub-editor; the chief sub thought ‘predator’ an upstage word for a mass-circulation Sunday paper and substituted ‘wild animal’, adding a question mark at the end of the line. The report claimed a thirteen-year-old schoolboy had been the first to see the creature, and had attempted to photograph it. Stanley’s name, which had lost a syllable when his great-grandfather Leib Dobrowsky landed from Lithuania in 1920, was misspelt as ‘Dobrov’. His mother carefully corrected this in the cuttings she sent to her mother-in-law, a cousin abroad, and to the collateral family who had given the camera. People telephoned: I believe your Stan was in the paper! What was it he saw?

A vet said the teeth-marks on the dead pets, Mrs Sheena McLeod’s ‘Natasha’ and the Bezuidenhout family’s beloved ‘Fritzie’, were consistent with the type of bite given by a wild cat. Less than a hundred years ago, viverra civetta must have been a common species in the koppies around the city; nature sometimes came back, forgot time and survived eight-lane freeways, returning to ancestral haunts. He recalled the suicidal swim of two elephants who struck out making for ancient mating grounds across Lake Kariba, beneath which 5,000 square kilometres of their old ruminants’ pathways were drowned in a man-made sea. A former pet-shop owner wrote to Readers’ Views with the opinion that the animal almost certainly was a vervet monkey, an escaped pet. Those who had seen it insisted it was a larger species, though most likely of the ape family. Stanley Dobrow and his two friends described the face reflected between trees, beside them on the surface of the swimming pool: dark face with ‘far-back’ eyes – whether what broke the image was Stanley’s scramble from the water or the advance of the caterpillar device that crawled about the pool sucking up dirt, they never agreed.

Whatever it was, it made