Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,212

ran for his shotgun. When he got back to the yard, it was still on the roof (must have shinned up by the drainpipe, and to come down that way would have brought it right to Bokkie Scholtz’s feet). He fired, but was in such a state, you can imagine – hands shaking – missed the head and got the bastard in the arm – funny thing, almost the same place it had bitten Lily. And then, would you believe it, one arm hanging useless, it ran round to the other side of the garage roof and took a leap – ten feet it must be – right over to that big old tree they call a Tree of Heaven, in the neighbour’s garden on the other side. Of course he raced next door and he and the neighbours were after it, but it got away, from tree to tree (their legs are like another pair of arms), up that steep little street that leads to the koppies of Kensington Ridge, and he never had the chance of another shot at it.

The Bokkie Scholtzs’ house is burglar-proofed, has fine wires on windows and doors which activate an alarm that goes hysterical, with noises like those science fiction films have taught come from outer space, whenever Dallas tries to get in through a fanlight. They have a half-breed Rottweiler who was asleep, apparently, on the front stoep, when the attack came. It just shows you – whatever you do, you can’t call yourself safe.

On a Saturday night towards 2 a.m. there was an extensive power failure over the Witwatersrand area of the Transvaal. A number of parties were brought to an end in rowdy darkness. Two women and three men were trapped in an elevator on their way up to a nightclub. There was a knifing in a discotheque stampede. A hospital had to switch over to emergency generators. Most people were in bed asleep and did not know about the failure until next morning, when they went to switch on a kettle. But clocks working off household mains marked an hour exactly: 1.36 a.m.

The early morning news mentioned the failure. The cause remained to be established. Alternative sources of power would soon be linked to restore electricity to affected suburbs in Johannesburg and peripheral areas. The midday news reported sabotage was not suspected. On television in the evening, no mention, but the radio announced from official sources that in the early hours of Sunday morning several limpet mines had struck a power station causing severe damage. There was no information about loss of life.

The newspapers, prohibited by Section 4 of the Protection of Information Act of 1982 and Section 29 of the Internal Security Act of 1982 from publishing anything they might learn about the extent of the damage, how and by whom it was caused, and not permitted to take photographs at the scene itself, titillated circulation with human interest stories (Bouncing Baby Boy Delivered by Candlelight) and, keeping the balance of a fine semantic nuance above the level where words break the law, recalled the number, nature and relative successes of similar acts of urban sabotage in the current year as compared with those of the two preceding years. It was all analysed academically, the way military strategists fight past wars on paper. There were maps with arrows indicating point of infiltration of saboteurs from neighbouring states, and broken lines in heavy type culminating in black stars: the conjectured route taken from point of entry to target. Sometimes the route by which the saboteurs probably made their escape, afterwards, was marked. Others had been caught, killed while security forces were giving chase, or put on trial. The sentence of death by hanging was passed and executed, in one or two cases.

The Prime Minister had been scheduled to make a major speech in a farming constituency where a by-election was to be held. Instead of having to counter dissatisfaction with his agricultural policy, he was able to call upon support from all sections of the community to meet the threat from beyond our borders that was always ready to strike at our country. He did not need to, nor did he mention this latest attack on its vitals, which had happened only three days before the speech; his face, composed somewhere between a funeral and a stryddag, was enough to put complaints about beef and maize prices to shame.

The release of official statements lags behind what people in the