Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,210

an applauding click of the tongue.

As their brothers had for generations carried coal and sacks of potatoes, they unloaded and stowed in the pit they had dug the AKM assault rifles and bayonets, the grey limpet mines with detonators and timing devices, the defensive and offensive hand grenades. The pit was lined and covered with plastic sheeting and covered again with earth, grasses and small shrubs uprooted in the dark. The shelter for the two men was far less elaborately constructed. The stope was there; with Charles they hitched a sheet of plastic overhead to hold the loose earth and put down a couple of blankets off the mattresses in the back bedroom, some tins of food and packs of cigarettes. The entrance to the stope, already concealed on all but one side by the rocks, was covered with branches cut from the single freestanding tree that grew among them. (With another part of his mind, Charles identified, while hacking away at it, the Transvaal elm or white stinkwood, which would have grown much taller near water.)

They could not make fires. But before Vusi decided that his night visits should cease, Charles brought them a very small camper gas-ring, which was safe to use well back in the stope and during the day only, when any light from its tiny crown of blue flame would be absorbed in the light of the sun. That light had never seemed so total and shadowless, to them. It laid their silent rocks open like a sacrificial altar to a high hot sky from which even the faintest gauze of cloud was burned away. It surrounded them with a clarity in which they were the only things concealed, the only things it couldn’t get at. At first they could not come out at all into the sun’s Colossus eye, a fly’s a million times faceted, that revealed the minutely striated smoothness of one tube of grass, the combination of colours that made up a flake of verdigris on a stone, the bronze collar on the carapace of a beetle working through a cake of cow dung. Then they found a narrow cleft where, one at a time, they could lie hidden and get some air through the overhang of coarse dusty leaves. Impossible for anyone straying past to see a human figure in there. If cows had used the shallow dugout to rest in, herdsmen, the boy children or old men who couldn’t earn money in the cities, must have rested here, too. Both Vusi and Eddie had grown up in the black locations of industrial cities and had never spent days whose passing was marked only by the movement of cattle over the veld and the movement of the sun over the cattle. Eddie lay, in his turn, on the shelf among the rocks, in this – crazy – peace: now. What a time to feel such a thing; how was it possible that it still existed, with what was waiting, and buried, there in the pit.

Vusi used that peace to go over behind wide open eyes (again unable to smoke, this time because the trail would hang as marker above the deserted rocks) every detail of what he had learnt from his contacts, planned on that basis, and planned again to provide for any hitch that might upset the timing of the first plan. He knew from experience that nothing ever goes quite according to any plan. The wire that should be cut like a hair by an AKM bayonet turns out to be a brick wall, the watchtower that should be vacant for two minutes between the departure of one security guard and the arrival of the next is not vacant because the first guard has lingered to blow his nose in his fingers. Vusi’s concentration matched the peace. A lizard ran softly over his foot as if over a dead body dumped among the rocks.

They played cards in their cave. They slept a lot. They had bursts of discussion; indiscriminately, about trivial matters – whether athletes lived longer than other people, whether you could stop smoking by having a Chinaman stick needles in your ear – and about segments of experience that somehow were not integrated into any continuity that is what is meant by ‘a life’. Vusi told, as if something dreamt, how in Russia in summer when it was stuffily hot he had lain on the ground, like this, lain on some grass in a park and felt