Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,71

of trouble, Emma always saves me. The same Emma. And yet it’s not the same. And what could I do for her?

I suppose she wants to be back there now. But still she wouldn’t be the same. I don’t often get the feeling she knows what I’m thinking about, any more, or that I know what she’s thinking, but she said, ‘You and he go off, you come back or perhaps you don’t come back, you know what you must do. But for a woman? What shall I do there in my life? What shall I do here? What time is this for a woman?’

It’s hard for her. Emma. She’ll say all that often now, I know. She tells me everything so many times. Well, I don’t mind it when I fetch her from the hospital and I don’t mind going to the market. But straight after we’ve eaten, now, in the evenings, I let her go through it once and then I’m off. To walk in the streets when it gets a bit cooler in the dark. I don’t know why it is but I’m thinking so bloody hard about getting out there in the streets that I push down my food as fast as I can without her noticing. I’m so keen to get going I feel queer, kind of tight and excited. Just until I can get out and not hear. I wouldn’t even mind skipping the meal. In the streets in the evening everyone is out. On the grass along the bay the fat Indians in their white suits with their wives in those fancy coloured clothes. Men and their girls holding hands. Old watchmen like beggars, sleeping in the doorways of the shut shops. Up and down people walk, walk, just sliding one foot after the other because now and then, like somebody lifting a blanket, there’s air from the sea. She should come out for a bit of air in the evening, man. It’s an old, old place this, they say. Not the buildings, I mean; but the place. They say ships were coming here before even a place like London was a town. She thought the bay was so nice, that first day. The lights from the ships run all over the water and the palms show up a long time even after it gets dark. There’s a smell I’ve smelled ever since we’ve been here – three years! I don’t mean the smells in the native town; a special warm night smell. You can even smell it at three in the morning. I’ve smelled it when I was standing about with Emma, by the window; it’s as hot in the middle of the night here as it is in the middle of the day at home – funny, when you look at the stars and the dark. Well, I’ll be going off soon. It can’t be long now. Now that Josias is gone. You’ve just got to wait your time; they haven’t forgotten about you. Dar es Salaam. Dar. Sometimes I walk with another chap from home, he says some things, makes you laugh! He says the old watchmen who sleep in the doorways get their wives to come there with them. Well, I haven’t seen it. He says we’re definitely going with the next lot. Dar es Salaam. Dar. One day I suppose I’ll remember it and tell my wife I stayed three years there, once. I walk and walk, along the bay, past the shops and hotels and the German church and the big bank, and through the mud streets between old shacks and stalls. It’s dark there and full of other walking shapes as I go past light coming from the cracks in the walls, where the people are in their homes.

Friday’s Footprint

Friday’s Footprint

The hotel stood a hundred yards up from the bank of the river. On the lintel above the screen door at the entrance, small gilt letters read: J. P. CUNNINGHAM, LICENSED TO SELL MALT, WINE AND SPIRITUOUS LIQUORS; the initials had been painted in over others that had been painted out. Sitting in the office off the veranda, at the old, high, pigeonhole desk stuffed with papers, with the cardboard files stacked round her in record of twenty years, she turned her head now and then to the water. She did not see it, the sheeny, gnat-hazy surface of the tropical river; she rested her eyes a moment. And then she turned back to her invoices