Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,202

as he went along. Outside a white men’s bar a black girl singled him out with a sidling look, and approached. He smiled and walked on: no thanks, sisi. With the prostitute’s eye for the stranger in town, she was the only one in the city to recognise him: someone set apart in the crowd of his own kind from which he appeared indistinguishable.

Stanley Dobrow entered his photograph for the ‘Picture of The Year’ competition held by a morning paper.

Old Grahame Fraser-Smith – the ‘old’ was an epithet of comradeliness on the part of his colleagues, he was only forty-eight – got the idea in his head that although short-sighted, he had seen into the eyes of the creature. In the operating theatre, during those intervals between putting together broken faces with a human skill and ingenuity more miraculous than God’s making of a woman out of a man’s rib, he told the story differently, now. It seemed to him that as he bent down for the golf ball, he saw the creature bend first, just as he was doing, but farther off. And they looked at each other. You know how arresting eyes can be? It was hardly necessary to point this out where everyone around him was reduced to eyes above masks. No, true, he couldn’t describe the body, certainly not the gait, as van Gelder insisted he could. Yet the eyes – you know how it is sometimes, in a room full of people, you see really only one person, you look into that pair of eyes and it’s as if you are face to face, alone, with that person? It was like suddenly meeting someone seen many times on a photograph; or someone he’d been told about as a child; or someone people had been telling one another about for generations. He stopped there. He didn’t want the assisting surgeons, anaesthetist, nurses, the medical students who came to watch the beauty of his work (about which he was genuinely modest) to reduce that encounter to something fanciful, and therefore funny. But if van Gelder was a bone man, so was he, a Hamlet who had contemplated and reconstructed with his own hands the living maxillo-facial structure of a thousand Yoricks. To himself he secretly continued: he had looked back into a consciousness from which part of his own came. There were claims from within oneself that could materialise only in these unsought ways, in apparently trivial or fortuitous happenings that could be felt but not understood. He thought of the experience as some sort of slip in the engagement of the cogs of time.

Eddie was there before dark.

Vusi and Charles were playing chess and Joy was burning rubbish in the front garden. So she was first to see him come as she was first to know he had gone. She had a broken branch and went on poking at whatever was burning until he had to pass her on his way up to the house. She put up a folded hand with her usual effacing gesture, smiling, not aware that she smeared the cobweb of flying ashes that had settled on her forehead. ‘Hello.’

If she wouldn’t ask any questions, he would.

Eddie stopped. ‘What’s that for?’

She was better-looking with the waves of flame melting the narrow definitions of her face, colouring and rounding it. ‘A rat came into the bathroom. They’re breeding in that pile of junk we threw out of the shed. I had to lug everything round here.’

He nodded. He had been away, but at once was together with her, with the others, again, in the knowledge that no fire could be made near what was behind the new garage door.

He went on to the house.

They must have heard him talking to Joy. They must have decided to talk it out calmly, but Charles struggled up from under his own self-control, the chessmen rolled over the floor. ‘Are you bloody mad?’ He was gone from the room.

Vusi did not seem to see Charles; opened his mouth dryly and closed it again.

Eddie dribbled one of the chessmen with the toe of his running shoe. He went out to the kitchen, and came back with a beer. Charles was there, gathering up the chessmen.

The release of gas from the beer can as he pierced it was like an opening exclamation from Eddie. ‘Well, nothing happened. I went to town, I’m back.’

Vusi was silent, withholding his attention.

Charles had his big body safely chained down on a stool. ‘I’m