Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,62

flag like a kid with a balloon. That’s how Josias was, too. Of course, if you didn’t take any notice of the warning and went on and crashed into the truck, he would be the first to be blown to high heaven and hell, but he always just sits there, this chap, as if he has no idea when he was born or that he might not die on a bed an old man of eighty. As if the dust in his eyes and the racket of the truck are going to last for ever.

My sister knew she had a good man but she never said anything about being afraid of this job. She only grumbled in winter, when he was stuck out there in the cold and used to get a cough (she’s a nurse), and on those times in summer when it rained all day and she said he would land up with rheumatism, crippled, and then who would give him work? The dynamite people? I don’t think it ever came into her head that any day, every day, he could be blown up instead of coming home in the evening. Anyway, you wouldn’t have thought so by the way she took it when he told us what it was he was going to have to do.

I was working down at a garage in town, that time, at the petrol pumps, and I was eating before he came in because I was on night shift. Emma had the water ready for him and he had a wash without saying much, as usual, but then he didn’t speak when they sat down to eat, either, and when his fingers went into the mealie meal he seemed to forget what it was he was holding and not to be able to shape it into a mouthful. Emma must have thought he felt too dry to eat, because she got up and brought him a jam tin of the beer she had made for Saturday. He drank it and then sat back and looked from her to me, but she said, ‘Why don’t you eat?’ and he began to, slowly. She said, ‘What’s the matter with you?’ He got up and yawned and yawned, showing those brown chipped teeth that remind me of the big ape at the Johannesburg zoo that I saw once when I went with the school. He went into the other room of the house, where he and Emma slept, and he came back with his pipe. He filled it carefully, the way a poor man does; I saw, as soon as I went to work at the filling station, how the white men fill their pipes, stuffing the tobacco in, shoving the tin half-shut back into the glovebox of the car.

‘I’m going down to Sela’s place,’ said Emma. ‘I can go with Willie on his way to work if you don’t want to come.’

‘No. Not tonight. You stay here.’ Josias always speaks like this, the short words of a schoolmaster or a boss-boy, but if you hear the way he says them, you know he is not really ordering you around at all, he is only asking you.

‘No, I told her I’m coming,’ Emma said, in the voice of a woman having her own way in a little thing.

‘Tomorrow.’ Josias began to yawn again, looking at us with wet eyes.

‘Go to bed,’ Emma said, ‘I won’t be late.’

‘No, no, I want to . . .’ he blew a sigh ‘—when he’s gone, man—’ he moved his pipe at me. ‘I’ll tell you later.’

Emma laughed. ‘What can you tell that Willie can’t hear—’ I’ve lived with them ever since they were married. Emma always was the one who looked after me, even before, when I was a little kid. It was true that whatever happened to us happened to us together. He looked at me; I suppose he saw that I was a man, now: I was in my blue overalls with Shell on the pocket and everything.

He said, ‘. . . they want me to do something . . . a job with the truck.’

Josias used to turn out regularly to political meetings and he took part in a few protests before everything went underground, but he had never been more than one of the crowd. We had Mandela and the rest of the leaders, cut out of the paper, hanging on the wall, but he had never known, personally, any of them. Of course there