Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,194

the Sergeant’s young wife ought to learn how to handle a firearm. Next time it might be more than a monkey out there in the yard. Sergeant Chapman ought to know the situation.

There had to be some sign that the plot was being cultivated. That was what black men were for; so Eddie hoed the mealie patch. Vusi kept to the house. He sat in his armchair and read a thick paperback whose pages, top and bottom, were splayed and puffed by exposure to climatic changes or by much thumbing. Africa Undermined: A History of the Mining Companies and the Underdevelopment of Africa: sometimes he would borrow a ballpoint from Joy, mark a passage. If he began to yawn and sigh this was a prelude to his suddenly getting up and disappearing into the back room. She would hear him tinkering there, the clink of small tools; she supposed it was to do with what was locked in the shed. She filled several hours a day with Teach Yourself Portuguese, but didn’t have her cassettes with her, here, as a guide to pronunciation, so had to concentrate on the grammar. Vusi could have helped her with German – but Portuguese!

‘How long were you there?’ He had trained in East Germany. That much she knew about him.

‘Two years and three months. We didn’t learn from books. You just have to begin to talk, man, you have to make people understand you when you want something, that’s the best way. But what d’you want to learn Portuguese for?’

‘Mozambique. Charles and I thought of going there. To live.’ She pulled her hair back down behind the arms of her glasses. ‘I might go, anyway. Teach for a while.’

‘What do you teach?’

She made an awkward face. ‘I haven’t much, yet. But I can teach history. The new education system there; I’d like to be involved . . . in something like that. One day.’ The two words passed to him as a token that she was not deserting.

‘Ja. You’d like it. It’s going to be a good place. And Charlie, he’s learning too?’

‘He was. But not now.’

Vusi picked up her book and tried out a phrase or two, smiled at his poor effort.

‘You do speak Portuguese.’

‘Some words . . . I was only there a couple of months, everyone talks English to you.’ He managed, with an accent better than hers, a few more phrases, as if for his and her amusement.

He sat in his chair again, waiting, his face as he himself would never see it, not in any photograph or mirror. He was possessed by an expression far from anyone’s reach, so deep in the past of himself, a sorrow he did not consciously feel there in the watergleam of his black eyes hidden in the ancient cave of skull, in the tenuousness of life in the fine gills of the nostrils, the extraordinary unconscious settling of the grooved lips – lips that, when he was unaware of himself, not using them to shape the half-articulate communication of a poorly educated black man’s English, held in their form what has never been, might still be spoken.

Now when he did speak, on the conscious level of their being in the room together, it seemed to her he did not know who he was; she had to make the quick adjustment to his working perception of himself. ‘You not really married?’

She looked at his mystery, while he showed simple curiosity.

‘No. Not really anything.’

He understood – was meant to understand? – she doesn’t sleep with Charlie. If so, it was a confidence that licensed questions. ‘What’s the idea?’

‘Well. There’s no other room for me, is there.’

He arched his head back against the chair, expelled a breath towards the ceiling with its pine-knots and pressed lead curlicues all four of them, at times, took tally of obsessively.

‘We came to a sort of stop. About five months ago, after nearly six years. But we’d already accepted to do this, while we were still together, so we couldn’t let that make any difference.’

‘Hell, you’re a funny kind of woman.’

It was said with detached admiration. She laughed. ‘You know better than I do what matters.’

‘Sure. Still—’

‘It’s because I’m a woman you say still—’

He saw she jealously took his admiration as some sort of discrimination within commitment. He shied away. There came out of that mouth of his a careless response a city black man picks up as the idiom of whites in the streets. ‘That’s one I can’t handle.’

He