Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,56

a shake of castanets at the back of her tongue. ‘Congress! Everybody can say. Why you’re working?’

And a man in a sweatshirt, with a knitted woollen cap on his head, shouted, ‘Stay-at-home. Nobody but traitors work today. What are you driving the white man for?’

‘I’ve just told you, man, I’ve been away a week in Bechuanaland. I must get home somehow, mustn’t I? Finish this, man, let us get on, I tell you.’

They made Hirsch and his boy get out of the car, but Hirsch, watching and listening to the explosive vehemence between his boy and the crowd, clung to the edge of a desperate, icy confidence: the boy was explaining to them – one of their own people. They did not actually hold Hirsch, but they stood around him, men whose nostrils moved in and out as they breathed; big-breasted warriors from the washtub who looked at him, spoke together, and spat; even children, who filled up the spaces between the legs so that the stirring human press that surrounded him was solid and all alive. ‘Tell them, can’t you?’ he kept appealing, encouragingly.

‘Where’s your pass?’

‘His pass, his pass!’ the women began to yell.

‘Where’s your pass?’ the man who had caught Phillip through the car window screamed in his face.

And he yelled back, too quickly, ‘I’ve burned it! It’s burned! I’ve finished with the pass!’

The women began to pull at his clothes. The men might have let him go, but the women set upon his fine city clothes as if he were an effigy. They tore and poked and snatched, and there – perhaps they had not really been looking for it or expected it – at once, fell the passbook. One of them ran off with it through the crowd, yelling and holding it high and hitting herself on the breast with it. People began to fight over it, like a souvenir. ‘Burn! Burn!’ ‘Kill him!’

Somebody gave Phillip a felling blow aimed for the back of his neck, but whoever it was was too short to reach the target and the blow caught him on the shoulder blade instead.

‘O my God, tell them, tell them, your own people!’ Hirsch was shouting angrily. With a perfect, hypnotising swiftness – the moment of survival, when the buck outleaps the arc of its own strength past the lion’s jaws – his boy was in the car, and with a shuddering rush of power, shaking the men off as they came, crushing someone’s foot as the tyres scudded madly, drove on.

‘Come back!’ Hirsch’s voice, although he could not hear it, swelled so thick in his throat it almost choked him. ‘Come back, I tell you!’ Beside him and around him, the crowd ran. Their mouths were wide, and he did not know for whom they were clamouring – himself or the boy.

A Chip of Glass Ruby

When the duplicating machine was brought into the house, Bamjee said, ‘Isn’t it enough that you’ve got the Indians’ troubles on your back?’ Mrs Bamjee said, with a smile that showed the gap of a missing tooth but was confident all the same, ‘What’s the difference, Yusuf? – we’ve all got the same troubles.’

‘Don’t tell me that. We don’t have to carry passes; let the natives protest against passes on their own, there are millions of them. Let them go ahead with it.’

The nine Bamjee and Pahad children were present at this exchange as they were always; in the small house that held them all there was no room for privacy for the discussion of matters they were too young to hear, and so they had never been too young to hear anything. Only their sister and half-sister, Girlie, was missing; she was the eldest, and married. The children looked expectantly, unalarmed and interested, at Bamjee, who had neither left the dining room nor settled down again to the task of rolling his own cigarettes, which had been interrupted by the arrival of the duplicator. He looked at the thing that had come hidden in a wash-basket and conveyed in a black man’s taxi, and the children turned on it, too, their black eyes surrounded by thick lashes like those still, open flowers with hairy tentacles that close on whatever touches them.

‘A fine thing to have on the dining-room table,’ was all he said at last. They smelled the machine among them; a smell of cold black grease. He went out, heavily on tiptoe, in his troubled way.

‘It’s going to go nicely on the sideboard!’ Mrs Bamjee