Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,63

were his friends Ndhlovu and Seb Masinde who said they had gone underground and who occasionally came late at night for a meal or slept in my bed for a few hours.

‘They want to stop the truck on the road . . .’

‘Stop it?’ Emma was like somebody stepping into cold dark water; with every word that was said she went deeper. ‘But how can you do it – when? Where will they do it?’ She was wild, as if she must go out and prevent it all happening right then.

I felt that cold water of Emma’s rising round the belly because Emma and I often had the same feelings, but I caught also, in Josias’s not looking at me, a signal Emma couldn’t know. Something in me jumped at it like catching a swinging rope. ‘They want the stuff inside . . . ?’

Nobody said anything.

I said, ‘What a lot of big bangs you could make with that, man,’ and then shut up before Josias needed to tell me to.

‘So what’re you going to do?’ Emma’s mouth stayed open after she had spoken, the lips pulled back.

‘They’ll tell me everything. I just have to give them the best place on the road – that’ll be the Free State road, the others’re too busy . . . and . . . the time when we pass . . .’

‘You’ll be dead.’ Emma’s head was shuddering and her whole body shook; I’ve never seen anybody give up like that. He was dead already, she saw it with her eyes and she was kicking and screaming without knowing how to show it to him. She looked like she wanted to kill Josias herself, for being dead. ‘That’ll be the finish, for sure. He’s got a gun, the white man in front, hasn’t he, you told me. And the one with him? They’ll kill you. You’ll go to prison. They’ll take you to Pretoria gaol and hang you by the rope . . . yes, he’s got the gun, you told me, didn’t you . . . many times you told me . . .’

‘The others’ve got guns too. How d’you think they can hold us up? – they’ve got guns and they’ll come all round him. It’s all worked out—’

‘The one in front will shoot you, I know it, don’t tell me, I know what I say—’ Emma went up and down and around till I thought she would push the walls down – they wouldn’t have needed much pushing, in that house in Tembekile Location – and I was scared of her. I don’t mean for what she would do to me if I got in her way, or to Josias, but for what might happen to her: something like taking a fit or screaming that none of us would be able to forget.

I don’t think Josias was sure about doing the job before but he wanted to do it now. ‘No shooting. Nobody will shoot me. Nobody will know that I know anything. Nobody will know I tell them anything. I’m held up just the same like the others! Same as the white man in front! Who can shoot me? They can shoot me for that?’

‘Someone else can go, I don’t want it, do you hear? You will stay at home, I will say you are sick . . . you will be killed, they will shoot you . . . Josias, I’m telling you, I don’t want . . . I won’t . . .’

I was waiting my chance to speak, all the time, and I felt Josias was waiting to talk to someone who had caught the signal. I said quickly, while she went on and on, ‘But even on that road there are some cars?’

‘Roadblocks,’ he said, looking at the floor. ‘They’ve got the signs, the ones you see when a road’s being dug up, and there’ll be some men with picks. After the truck goes through they’ll block the road so that any other cars turn off on to the old road there by Kalmansdrif. The same thing on the other side, two miles on. There where the farm road goes down to Nek Halt.’

‘Hell, man! Did you have to pick what part of the road?’

‘I know it like this yard. Don’t I?’

Emma stood there, between the two of us, while we discussed the whole business. We didn’t have to worry about anyone hearing, not only because Emma kept the window wired up in that kitchen,