Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,208

be hanging around. He’ll be arriving every day with his hoe and whatnot. He may bring friends with him.’

‘So it would have been better if you’d gone out and played the heavy baas scene.’

‘I’ve told you, you couldn’t have done anything else.’

The occasional lapses of confidence in herself, that had roused his tenderness when they were lovers, now irritated Charles. You had no business to have gone this far, to be the back-up for Vusi and Eddie – all that meant – if you were still at the stage of allowing yourself self-doubt. But they were alone; no Vusi, no Eddie, and there they had to stay until Charles, on one of his outings in the combi, learnt that arrangements were ready for them to get away, as arrangements, at the beginning, had brought them successfully to Klopper’s Eiendoms Beperk to look for a place in this area. They had only each other, even if it was in an awareness very different from that of the lovers they had been. They had lost the scent of one another’s skin; but the house held them together, this place which they had occupied, not lived in, as in old wars soldiers occupied trenches and stuck up pictures of girls there. Neither said to the other what both felt while going matter-of-factly through this stage of what had been undertaken: some days, a desolate desire to get away from the house, the shed with the shiny roll-down door, the veld where except for the mealie patch, khakiweed filled in the pattern of rows where beans and potatoes had once grown; some hours, a sense of attachment to the room under the ox-wagon wheel chandelier and the curlicues of the pressed lead ceiling where the four of them had spent time that could never be recorded in the annals of ordinary life; to the outhouse they had bricked up together, and even to an aspect neither of them would ever have of any landscape again – the presence of the towers of the power station, away over the veld. This sense of attachment was so strong there seemed, while it lasted, no other reality anywhere to be found.

The ape family is not exactly omnivorous. Like the human animal, it is able to adapt its eating habits to changes of environment. If the creature had been a pet, or kept in any other form of captivity normal for a creature whose needs must be subordinate to the dominant human species, the diet supplied to it would have been fruit, vegetables and some cereal, probably stale bread. It also would have developed, as creatures do in mournful compensation for what they cannot tell those who keep them caged or secured by a chain to a perch, yearnings transformed into addiction to certain tidbits. Although members of the ape family are generally vegetarian in their wild state, in times of drought, for example, they will eat anything their agility and the strength of their hands equip them to catch; and in captivity this atavistic (so to speak) memory can be seen to rouse from quiet masturbation a perfectly well-fed blue-bottomed baboon in the Johannesburg zoo, whose prehensile bolt of lightning strikes down any pigeon who flies through the cage on the lookout for crumbs – he tears it apart instantly. The instinct must have been what returned to the fugitive when, in early weeks on the run, it killed or maimed dogs and cats. This surely was a period of great fear. Humans are the source of the terror of capture; a dog or cat is an intermediary who represents the lesser risk. To kill a suburban dog or cat is to destroy the enemy’s envoy as well as to eat.

But after a while the creature changed its tastes. Or became more confident? Sergeant Abel van Niekerk and Constables Gqueka, Mcunu and Manaka had not been able to catch it. It had feasted on venison.

Now it lived by raiding dustbins; if not carelessly bold, then desperate. It still frequented the affluent suburbs where first seen, although now and then a sortie into the working-class white suburbs was again reported. Most likely it was from that class of home it had escaped (though no one was admitting any responsibility) because along with racing pigeons, rabbits, etc., an ape is a lower-income-group pet, conferring a distinction (that man who goes around with his tame monkey) on people who haven’t much hope of attaining it as a company director or