Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,61

not understand and had not had time to learn.

The hunger strike at the prison went into the second week. Alone in the rattling cab of his lorry, he said things that he heard as if spoken by someone else, and his heart burned in fierce agreement with them. ‘For a crowd of natives who’ll smash our shops and kill us in our houses when their time comes.’ ‘She will starve herself to death there.’ ‘She will die there.’ ‘Devils who will burn and kill us.’ He fell into bed each night like a stone, and dragged himself up in the mornings as a beast of burden is beaten to its feet.

One of these mornings, Girlie appeared very early, while he was wolfing bread and strong tea – alternate sensations of dry solidity and stinging heat – at the kitchen table. Her real name was Fatima, of course, but she had adopted the silly modern name along with the clothes of the young factory girls among whom she worked. She was expecting her first baby in a week or two, and her small face, her cut and curled hair and the sooty arches drawn over her eyebrows did not seem to belong to her thrust-out body under a clean smock. She wore mauve lipstick and was smiling her cocky little white girl’s smile, foolish and bold, not like an Indian girl’s at all.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said.

She smiled again. ‘Don’t you know? I told Bobby he must get me up in time this morning. I wanted to be sure I wouldn’t miss you today.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

She came over and put her arm up around his unwilling neck and kissed the grey bristles at the side of his mouth. ‘Many happy returns! Don’t you know it’s your birthday?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know, didn’t think—’ He broke the pause by swiftly picking up the bread and giving his attention desperately to eating and drinking. His mouth was busy, but his eyes looked at her, intensely black. She said nothing, but stood there with him. She would not speak, and at last he said, swallowing a piece of bread that tore at his throat as it went down, ‘I don’t remember these things.’

The girl nodded, the Woolworth baubles in her ears swinging. ‘That’s the first thing she told me when I saw her yesterday – don’t forget it’s Bajie’s birthday tomorrow.’

He shrugged over it. ‘It means a lot to children. But that’s how she is. Whether it’s one of the old cousins or the neighbour’s grandmother, she always knows when the birthday is. What importance is my birthday, while she’s sitting there in a prison? I don’t understand how she can do the things she does when her mind is always full of woman’s nonsense at the same time – that’s what I don’t understand with her.’

‘Oh, but don’t you see?’ the girl said. ‘It’s because she doesn’t want anybody to be left out. It’s because she always remembers; remembers everything – people without somewhere to live, hungry kids, boys who can’t get educated – remembers all the time. That’s how Ma is.’

‘Nobody else is like that.’ It was half a complaint.

‘No, nobody else,’ said his stepdaughter.

She sat herself down at the table, resting her belly. He put his head in his hands. ‘I’m getting old’ – but he was overcome by something much more curious, by an answer. He knew why he had desired her, the ugly widow with five children; he knew what way it was in which she was not like others; it was there, like the fact of the belly that lay between him and her daughter.

Some Monday for Sure

My sister’s husband, Josias, used to work on the railways but then he got this job where they make dynamite for the mines. He was the one who sits out on that little iron seat clamped to the back of the big red truck, with a red flag in his hand. The idea is that if you drive up too near the truck or look as if you’re going to crash into it, he waves the flag to warn you off. You’ve seen those trucks often on the Main Reef Road between Johannesburg and the mining towns – they carry the stuff and have DANGER – EXPLOSIVES painted on them. The man sits there, with an iron chain looped across his little seat to keep him from being thrown into the road, and he clutches his