Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,7

footlights on her black cheek caught and made a sparkle out of a single tear.

Like the crash of a crumbling building, the wild shouts of the people fell upon the stage; as the curtain jerked across, the players recollected themselves, went slowly off.

The fat young man chuckled to himself in the back of the car. ‘God, what we didn’t do to that play!’ he laughed.

‘What’d you kiss me again for?’ cried the young woman in surprise. ‘ – I didn’t know what was happening. We never had a kiss there, before – and all of a sudden’ – she turned excitedly to the others – ‘he takes hold of me and kisses me! I didn’t know what was happening!’

‘They liked it,’ snorted the young man. ‘One thing they understood anyway!’

‘Oh, I don’t know—’ said someone, and seemed about to speak.

But instead there was a falling away into silence.

The girl was plucking sullenly at the feathered hat, resting on her knee. ‘We cheated them; we shouldn’t have done it,’ she said.

‘But what could we do?’ The young woman turned shrilly, her eyes open and hard, excitedly determined to get an answer: an answer somewhere, from someone.

But there was no answer.

‘We didn’t know what to do,’ said the fat young man uncertainly, forgetting to be funny now, the way he lost himself when he couldn’t remember his lines on the stage.

Six Feet of the Country

Six Feet of the Country

My wife and I are not real farmers – not even Lerice, really. We bought our place, ten miles out of Johannesburg on one of the main roads, to change something in ourselves, I suppose; you seem to rattle about so much within a marriage like ours. You long to hear nothing but a deep satisfying silence when you sound a marriage. The farm hasn’t managed that for us, of course, but it has done other things, unexpected, illogical. Lerice, who I thought would retire there in Chekhovian sadness for a month or two, and then leave the place to the servants while she tried yet again to get a part she wanted and become the actress she would like to be, has sunk into the business of running the farm with all the serious intensity with which she once imbued the shadows in a playwright’s mind. I should have given it up long ago if it had not been for her. Her hands, once small and plain and well kept – she was not the sort of actress who wears red paint and diamond rings – are hard as a dog’s pads.

I, of course, am there only in the evenings and on weekends. I am a partner in a luxury travel agency, which is flourishing – needs to be, as I tell Lerice, in order to carry the farm. Still, though I know we can’t afford it, and though the sweetish smell of the fowls Lerice breeds sickens me, so that I avoid going past their runs, the farm is beautiful in a way I had almost forgotten – especially on a Sunday morning when I get up and go out into the paddock and see not the palm trees and fishpond and imitation-stone bird bath of the suburbs but white ducks on the dam, the lucerne field brilliant as window dresser’s grass, and the little, stocky, mean-eyed bull, lustful but bored, having his face tenderly licked by one of his ladies. Lerice comes out with her hair uncombed, in her hand a stick dripping with cattle dip. She will stand and look dreamily for a moment, the way she would pretend to look sometimes in those plays.

‘They’ll mate tomorrow,’ she will say. ‘This is their second day. Look how she loves him, my little Napoleon.’

So that when people come out to see us on Sunday afternoon, I am likely to hear myself saying as I pour out the drinks, ‘When I drive back home from the city every day, past those rows of suburban houses, I wonder how the devil we ever did stand it . . . Would you care to look around?’

And there I am, taking some pretty girl and her young husband stumbling down to our river bank, the girl catching her stockings on the mealie-stooks and stepping over cow turds humming with jewel-green flies while she says, ‘. . . the tensions of the damned city. And you’re near enough to get into town to a show, too! I think it’s wonderful. Why, you’ve got it both ways!’

And