Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,53

all, the boy was exactly as simple as they were, underneath, and he got on with them like a house on fire. Many’s the time some old woman or little kid came running up to the car when it was all packed to go on again and gave him a few eggs or a couple of roasted mealies in a bit of newspaper.

Early on in his job driving for Hirsch, Phillip had run into a calf; it did not stir on the deserted red-earth road between walls of mealie fields that creaked in a breeze. ‘Go on,’ said his boss, with the authority of one who knows what he is doing, who has learned in a hard school. ‘Go on, it’s dead, there’s nothing to do.’ The young man hesitated, appalled by the soft thump of the impact with which he had given his first death-dealing blow. ‘Go on. There could have been a terrible accident. We could have turned over. These farmers should be prosecuted, the way they don’t look after the cattle.’

Phillip reversed quickly, avoided the body in a wide curve and drove on. That was what made life on the road; whatever it was, soft touch or hard going, lie or truth, it was left behind. By the time you came by again in a month or two months, things had changed, forgotten and forgiven, and whatever you got yourself into this time, you had always the secret assurance that there would be another breathing space before you could be got at again.

Phillip had married after he had been travelling with Hirsch for a couple of years; the girl had had a baby by him earlier, but they had waited, as Africans sometimes do, until he could get a house for her before they actually got married. They had two more children, and he kept them pretty well – he wasn’t too badly paid, and of course he could get things wholesale, like the stove for the house. But up Piet Retief way, on one of the routes they took every month, there was a girl he had been sleeping with regularly for years. She swept up the hair cuttings in the local barbershop, where Hirsch sometimes went for a trim if he hadn’t had a chance over the weekend in Johannesburg. That was how Phillip had met her; he was waiting in the car for Hirsch one day, and the girl came out to sweep the step at the shop’s entrance. ‘Hi, wena sisi. I wish you would come and sweep my house for me,’ he called out drowsily.

For a long time now she had worn a signet ring, nine carats, engraved with his first name and hers; Hirsch did not carry anything in the jewellery line, but of course Phillip, in the fraternity of the road, knew the boys of other travellers who did. She was a plump, hysterical little thing, with very large eyes that could accommodate unshed tears for minutes on end, and – something unusual for black women – a faint moustache outlining her top lip. She would have been a shrew to live with, but it was pleasant to see how she awaited him every month with coy, bridling passion. When she pressed him to settle the date when they might marry, he filched some minor item from the extensive women’s range that Hirsch carried, and that kept her quiet until next time. Phillip did not consider this as stealing, but as part of the running expenses of the road to which he was entitled, and he was trustworthy with his boss’s money or goods in all other circumstances.

In fact, if he had known it and if Hirsch had known it, his filching fell below the margin for dishonesty that Hirsch, in his reckoning of the running expenses of the road, allowed: ‘They all steal, what’s the good of worrying about it? You change one, you get a worse thief, that’s all.’ It was one of Hirsch’s maxims in the philosophy of the road.

The morning they left on the Bechuanaland run, Hirsch looked up from the newspaper and said to his boy, ‘You’ve got your passbook, eh?’ There was the slightest emphasis on the ‘you’ve’, an emphasis confident rather than questioning. Hirsch was well aware that, although the blurred front-page picture before him showed black faces open-mouthed, black hands flung up triumphant around a bonfire of passbooks, Phillip was not the type to look for trouble.

‘Yes, sir, I’ve got it,’ said