Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,8

for a moment I accept the triumph as if I had managed it – the impossibility that I’ve been trying for all my life – just as if the truth was that you could get it ‘both ways’, instead of finding yourself with not even one way or the other but a third, one you had not provided for at all.

But even in our saner moments, when I find Lerice’s earthy enthusiasms just as irritating as I once found her histrionical ones, and she finds what she calls my ‘jealousy’ of her capacity for enthusiasm as big a proof of my inadequacy for her as a mate as ever it was, we do believe that we have at least honestly escaped those tensions peculiar to the city about which our visitors speak. When Johannesburg people speak of ‘tension’, they don’t mean hurrying people in crowded streets, the struggle for money, or the general competitive character of city life. They mean the guns under the white men’s pillows and the burglar bars on the white men’s windows. They mean those strange moments on city pavements when a black man won’t stand aside for a white man.

Out in the country, even ten miles out, life is better than that. In the country, there is a lingering remnant of the pre-transitional stage; our relationship with the blacks is almost feudal. Wrong, I suppose, obsolete, but more comfortable all around. We have no burglar bars, no gun. Lerice’s farm boys have their wives and their piccanins living with them on the land. They brew their sour beer without the fear of police raids. In fact, we’ve always rather prided ourselves that the poor devils have nothing much to fear, being with us; Lerice even keeps an eye on their children, with all the competence of a woman who has never had a child of her own, and she certainly doctors them all – children and adults – like babies whenever they happen to be sick.

It was because of this that we were not particularly startled one night last winter when the boy Albert came knocking at our window long after we had gone to bed. I wasn’t in our bed but sleeping in the little dressing-room-cum-linen-room next door, because Lerice had annoyed me and I didn’t want to find myself softening towards her simply because of the sweet smell of the talcum powder on her flesh after her bath. She came and woke me up. ‘Albert says one of the boys is very sick,’ she said. ‘I think you’d better go down and see. He wouldn’t get us up at this hour for nothing.’

‘What time is it?’

‘What does it matter?’ Lerice is maddeningly logical.

I got up awkwardly as she watched me – how is it I always feel a fool when I have deserted her bed? After all, I know from the way she never looks at me when she talks to me at breakfast the next day that she is hurt and humiliated at my not wanting her – and I went out, clumsy with sleep.

‘Which of the boys is it?’ I asked Albert as we followed the dance of my torch.

‘He’s too sick. Very sick, baas,’ he said.

‘But who? Franz?’ I remembered Franz had had a bad cough for the past week.

Albert did not answer; he had given me the path, and was walking along beside me in the tall dead grass. When the light of the torch caught his face, I saw that he looked acutely embarrassed. ‘What’s this all about?’ I said.

He lowered his head under the glance of the light. ‘It’s not me, baas. I don’t know. Petrus he send me.’

Irritated, I hurried him along to the huts. And there, on Petrus’s iron bedstead, with its brick stilts, was a young man, dead. On his forehead there was still a light, cold sweat; his body was warm. The boys stood around as they do in the kitchen when it is discovered that someone has broken a dish – uncooperative, silent. Somebody’s wife hung about in the shadows, her hands wrung together under her apron.

I had not seen a dead man since the war. This was very different. I felt like the others – extraneous, useless. ‘What was the matter?’ I asked.

The woman patted at her chest and shook her head to indicate the painful impossibility of breathing.

He must have died of pneumonia.

I turned to Petrus. ‘Who was this boy? What was he doing here?’ The light of a candle