Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer Page 0,84

while the sky remained light over the darkened earth and the clean crystal pebble of the evening star shone. The campfires – his own and the black men’s, over there – changed from near-invisible flickers of liquid colour to brilliant focuses of leaping tongues of light; it was dark. Every evening he sat like this through the short ceremony of the closing of the day, slowly filling his pipe, slowly easing his back round to the fire, yawning off the stiffness of his labour. Suddenly he gave a smothered giggle, to himself, of excitement. Her existence became real to him; he saw the face of the photograph, posed against a caravan door. He got up and began to pace about the camp, alert to promise. He kicked a log farther into the fire, he called an order to Piet, he walked up towards the tent and then changed his mind and strolled away again. In their own encampment at the edge of his, the road gang had taken up the exchange of laughing, talking, yelling and arguing that never failed them when their work was done. Black arms gestured under a thick foam of white soap, there was a gasp and splutter as a head broke the cold force of a bucketful of water, the gleaming bellies of iron cooking-pots were carried here and there in the talkative preparation of food. He did not understand much of what they were saying – he knew just enough Tswana to give them his orders, with help from Piet and one or two others who understood his own tongue, Afrikaans – but the sound of their voices belonged to this time of evening. One of the babies who always cried was keeping up a thin, ignored wail; the naked children were playing the chasing game that made the dog bark. He came back and sat down again at the fire, to finish his pipe.

After a certain interval (it was exact, though it was not timed by a watch, but by long habit that had established the appropriate lapse of time between his bath, his pipe and his food) he called out, in Afrikaans, ‘Have you forgotten my dinner, man?’

From across the patch of distorted darkness where the light of the two fires did not meet, but flung wobbling shapes and opaque, overlapping radiances, came the hoarse, protesting laugh that was, better than the tribute to a new joke, the pleasure in constancy to an old one.

Then a few minutes later: ‘Piet! I suppose you’ve burned everything, eh?’

‘Baas?’

‘Where’s the food, man?’

In his own time the black man appeared with the folding table and an oil lamp. He went back and forth between the dark and light, bringing pots and dishes and food, and nagging with deep satisfaction, in a mixture of English and Afrikaans. ‘You want koeksusters , so I make koeksusters. You ask me this morning. So I got to make the oil nice and hot, I got to get everything ready . . . It’s a little bit slow. Yes, I know. But I can’t get everything quick, quick. You hurry tonight, you don’t want wait, then it’s better you have koeksusters on Saturday, then I’m got time in the afternoon, I do it nice . . . Yes, I think next time it’s better . . .’

Piet was a good cook. ‘I’ve taught my boy how to make everything,’ the young man always told people, back in Francistown. ‘He can even make koeksusters,’ he had told the girl’s mother, in one of those silences of the woman’s disapproval that it was so difficult to fill. He had had a hard time, trying to overcome the prejudice of the girl’s parents against the sort of life he could offer her. He had managed to convince them that the life was not impossible, and they had given their consent to the marriage, but they still felt that the life was unsuitable, and his desire to please and reassure them had made him anxious to see it with their eyes and so forestall, by changes, their objections. The girl was a farm girl, and would not pine for town life, but, at the same time, he could not deny to her parents that living on a farm with her family around her, and neighbours only thirty or forty miles away, would be very different from living two hundred and twenty miles from a town or village, alone with him in a road camp ‘surrounded