Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,69

never came off. We had no money to pay for ourselves. There were plenty others like us, in the beginning. At last we just walked, right up Bechuanaland and through Northern Rhodesia to Mbeya, that’s over the border in Tanganyika, where we were headed for. A long walk; took Josias and me months. We met up with a chap who’d been given a bit of money and from there sometimes we went by bus. No one asks questions when you’re nobody special and you walk, like all the other African people themselves, or take the buses that the whites never use; it’s only if you’ve got the money for cars or to arrive in an aeroplane that all these things happen that you read about: getting sent back over the border, refused permits and so on. So we got here, to Tanganyika at last, down to this town of Dar es Salaam where we’d been told we’d be going.

There’s a refugee camp here and they give you a shilling or two a day until you get work. But it’s out of town, for one thing, and we soon left there and found a room down in the native town. There are some nice buildings, of course, in the real town – nothing like Johannesburg or Durban, though – and that used to be the white town, the whites who are left still live there, but the Africans with big jobs in the government and so on live there too. Some of our leaders who are refugees like us live in these houses and have big cars; everyone knows they’re important men, here, not like at home when if you’re black you’re just rubbish for the locations. The people down where we lived are very poor and it’s hard to get work because they haven’t got enough work for themselves, but I’ve got my standard seven and I managed to get a small job as a clerk. Josias never found steady work. But that didn’t matter so much because the big thing was that Emma was able to come to join us after five months, and she and I earn the money. She’s a nurse, you see, and Africanisation started in the hospitals and the government was short of nurses. So Emma got the chance to come up with a party of them sent for specially from South Africa and Rhodesia. We were very lucky because it’s impossible for people to get their families up here. She came in a plane paid for by the government, and she and the other girls had their photograph taken for the newspaper as they got off at the airport. That day she came we took her to the beach, where everyone can bathe, no restrictions, and for a cool drink in one of the hotels (she’d never been in a hotel before), and we walked up and down the road along the bay where everyone walks and where you can see the ships coming in and going out so near that the men out there wave to you. Whenever we bumped into anyone else from home they would stop and ask her about home, and how everything was. Josias and I couldn’t stop grinning to hear us all, in the middle of Dar, talking away in our language about the things we know. That day it was like it had happened already: the time when we are home again and everything is our way.

Well, that’s nearly three years ago, since Emma came. Josias has been sent away now and there’s only Emma and me. That was always the idea, to send us away for training. Some go to Ethiopia and some go to Algeria and all over the show and by the time they come back there won’t be anything Verwoerd’s men know in the way of handling guns and so on that they won’t know better. That’s for a start. I’m supposed to go too, but some of us have been waiting a long time. In the meantime I go to work and I walk about this place in the evenings and I buy myself a glass of beer in a bar when I’ve got money. Emma and I have still got the flat we had before Josias left and two nurses from the hospital pay us for the other bedroom. Emma still works at the hospital but I don’t know how much longer. Most days now since Josias’s gone she wants me