Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,189
interchangeable faces, that had made the speech.
The moment passed, and with it perhaps some passing test Vusi had put them to – and himself. He had opened a hand on the extreme danger hidden in this boring, fly-buzzing Sunday ‘living room’; in that instant they had all looked at it; and their silence said, calm: I know.
The allusion swerved away from themselves. Vusi was still speaking. ‘Can’t give any other reason why he should have them in his power, so he’s got to scare them into it. Scare. That’s all they’ve got left. What else is in that speech? After three hundred and fifty years. After how many governments? Spook people.’
It was a proposition that had comforted, spurred, lulled or inspired over many years. ‘So?’ Charles’s beard jutted. ‘That goes to show the power of fear, not the collapse of power.’
‘Exactly. Otherwise we wouldn’t need to be here.’ Joy’s reference to this house, their presence and purpose, sounded innocently vulgar: to be there was to have gone beyond discussion of why; to be freed of words.
Eddie gave hers a different, general application. ‘If whites could have been cured of being scared of blacks, that would have solved everything?’ He was laughing at the old liberal theory.
Charles swallowed a rough crumb of impulse to tell Eddie he didn’t need Eddie to give him a lesson on class and economics. ‘Hell, man . . . Just that there’s no point in telling ourselves they’re finished, they’re running down.’
Joy heard in Charles’s nervous asperity the fear of faltering he guarded against in others because it was in himself. There should be no love affairs between people doing this kind of – thing – (she still could not think of it as she wished to, as work to be done). She did not, now, want to be known by him as she knew him; there should be some conscious mental process available by which such knowledge would be withdrawn.
‘Don’t worry. If they’re running down, it’s because they know who’s after them.’ Eddie, talking big, seemed to become again the kid he must have been in street-gang rivalries that unknowingly rehearsed, for his generation of blacks, the awful adventure that was coming to them.
‘They were finished when they took the first slave.’ Knowledge of Vusi was barred somewhere between his murmured commonplaces and that face of his. He was not looking at any of them, now; but Joy had said once to Charles, in a lapse to referents of an esoteric culture she carefully avoided because these distanced him and her from Vusi and Eddie, that if Vusi were to be painted, the portrait would be one of those, like Velázquez’ Philip IV, whose eyes would meet yours no matter from what angle the painting were to be seen.
Vusi and Eddie had not been on student tours to the Prado. Vusi’s voice was matter-of-fact, hoarse. ‘It doesn’t matter how many times we have to sit here like this. They can’t stop us because we can’t stop. Never. Every time, when I’m waiting, I know I’m coming nearer.’
Eddie crackled back a page to frame something. ‘Opening of Koeberg’s going to be delayed by months and months, it says, ay Vusi?’
‘Ja, I saw.’
Charles and Joy did not know if Vusi was one of those who had attacked the nuclear reactor installation at the Cape before it was ready to operate, earlier in the year. A classic mission; that was the phrase. A strategic target successfully hit; serious material damage, no deaths, no blood shed. This terrifying task produces its outstanding practitioners, like any other. They did not know if Eddie knew something about Vusi they didn’t, had been told some night in the dark of the back room, while the two men lay there alone on their mattresses. Eddie’s remark might indicate he did know; or that he was fascinatedly curious and thought Vusi might be coaxed, without realising it, into saying something revealing. But Vusi didn’t understand flattery.
Eddie gave up. ‘What’s this committee of Cape Town whites who want it shut down?’
Charles took the paper from him. ‘Koeberg’s only thirty kilometres from Cape Town. A bicycle ride, man. Imagine what could happen once it’s producing. But d’you see the way the story’s handled? They write about “security” as if the place’s a jeweller’s shop that might be burgled, not a target we’ve already hit once.’
Joy read at an angle over his shoulder, an ugly strain on the tendons of her neck. ‘Nobody wants to go to