African Quilt : 24 Modern African Stories (9781101617441) (10 page)

True, he did not go to lunch and his wife prepared a meal for him as soon as he reached home after work. Nambewe. Up at half past five to heat the water for her husband. Up at half past five to prepare porridge for their children to eat before going to school. One of them was now at secondary school. Chingaipe hoped he would not turn into a brash, unmannered kid like Mavuto, in an office like this. He was trying to teach
his
children the meaning of work, determination, perseverance. Nambewe. Up at half past five to get her husband and children ready for the day. Nambewe, washing dirty pots and plates. Cleaning. Pounding grain for flour. Nambewe in her missionary blue
chirundu
and
nyakura,
a load of firewood on her head down the mountain slopes. Nambewe, smiling tenderly at him before they went off to sleep at night. Nambewe . . .

Chingaipe brought the puncher near the typewriter. He stood up with a sheaf of papers and inserted them in the space ready to punch holes in them. He tensed the muscles of his right hand and pressed down. Crunch. There was only one hole in the papers. The other half of the puncher had broken under the force, and fell on the floor with a loud clink.

The office was very still as Chingaipe groped about the floor for the broken piece. He looked from it back to the puncher. He pulled the sheaf of papers and laid them flat on the table. He sat down again and stared at the single hole.

Nambewe. Up at half past five to . . .

Chingaipe stood up again. He picked up the puncher and the broken piece and went past the now busy young clerks ostentatiously poring over their files. He opened the door to the passage and knocked on the door marked “Higher Clerical Officer” in large letters. He entered on hearing the growl, “Come in.”

He stood in front of the huge desk littered with trays, files, notebooks, ledger cards, and looked at the man behind. The Higher Officer was in his late forties. He had sparse hair—a fact which he attempted to hide by having his hair cut very short each time he went to the barber's. But one cannot hide a fast receding hairline. The cheap spectacles he wore glinted dully as he looked up slowly.

“Yes?”

“The puncher is broken, sir,” Chingaipe said slowly.

“The puncher is broken, sir,” mimicked the Higher Clerical Officer. “You mean ‘I broke the puncher,' don't you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You junior clerks, copy typists, and messengers,” he spat out, “you can't be trusted to do even a simple job without a catastrophe happening. What will happen to this department if equipment is broken every day?”

“I was only trying to punch holes in a few letters I had typed, sir,” Chingaipe explained.

“And you decided to break the puncher in the process?” the Higher Clerical Officer enquired. “You will have to see Mr. Thomson about this. We cannot allow this sort of thing to happen every day. I'm tired of all you junior clerks' tricks and inefficiency on the job. I swear some of you will get the sack before month end.”

Chingaipe stood quite still as the Higher Clerical Officer's face swam in front of him. Nambewe. Up at half past five to . . .

“You must report this personally to Mr. Thomson immediately,” the Higher Clerical Officer announced. “I cannot deal with this case myself.”

“Yes, sir.”

Chingaipe walked mechanically out of the room and down the passage, the puncher heavy in his hand. He went on, knocked, and entered Mr. Thomson's office.

“Good afternoon, Chingaipe.”

“Good afternoon, sir,” Chingaipe stammered. “The Higher Clerical Officer told me to see you, sir. I was trying to punch holes . . .”

“And the puncher broke?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Gosh!” Mr. Thomson exclaimed. “You must be strong, Chingaipe.”

Chingaipe was silent.

“Tell the Higher Clerical Officer to make out a local purchase order for a dozen punchers.”

“Yes, sir.”

Four o'clock. Time to go home. Chingaipe opened the bottom right-hand drawer. He took out the dust cover, locked the typewriter, and covered it. He stood up to go. The “IN” tray was empty. So was the building as he left. He said a tired goodbye to the night watchman.

“Tidzaonananso mawa, achimwene.”

N
ADINE
G
ORDIMER

Nadine Gordimer was born in 1923 in a small town outside of Johannesburg, South Africa. Her mother was British and her father was a Jewish emigré from Lithuania. She was educated at private schools and the University of Witwatersrand, and was a longtime activist against apartheid. She published her first short story at the age of fifteen and was introduced to the wider reading public in 1951with a story published in
The New Yorker.
Her narratives are rife with the politics and tension of life in South Africa. Several of her books were banned, leading to international protest. Since the end of apartheid, Gordimer has continued her active opposition to South Africa's censorship of radio, television, and print media. Among her many novels are
Occasion for Loving
(1963),
A Guest of Honor
(1970),
The Conservationist
(1974),
Burger's Daughter
(1979),
July's People
(1981),
A Sport of Nature
(1987),
The House Gun
(1998), and
No Time Like the Present
(2012). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 1991 Nobel Prize for literature.

Inkalamu's Place

(1965)

I
nkalamu Williamson's house is sinking and I don't suppose it will last out the next few rainy seasons. The red lilies still bloom as if there were somebody there. The house was one of the wonders of our childhood and when I went back to the territory last month for the independence celebrations I thought that on my way to the bauxite mines I'd turn off the main road to look for it. Like our farm, it was miles from anywhere when I was a child, but now it's only an hour or two away from the new capital. I was a member of a United Nations demographic commission (chosen to accompany them, I suppose, because of my old connection with the territory) and I left the big hotel in the capital after breakfast. The Peking delegation, who never spoke to any of us and never went out singly, came down with me in the lift. You could stare at them minutely, each in turn; neither they nor you were embarrassed. I walked through the cocktail terrace where the tiny flags of the nations stood on the tables from last night's reception, and drove myself out along the all-weather road where you can safely do eighty and drive straight on, no doubt, until you come out at the top of the continent—I only think of these things this way now; when I grew up here, this road didn't go anywhere else but home.

I had expected that a lot of the forest would have been cut down, but once outside the municipal boundary of the capital, it was just the same as always. There were no animals and few people. How secretly Africa is populated; when I got out of the car to drink coffee from my flask, I wanted to shout: Anybody there? The earth was neatly spaded back from the margins of the tar. I walked a few steps into the sunny forest, and my shoes exploded twigs and dry leaves like a plunderer. You must not start watching the big, egg-timer bodied ants: whole afternoons used to go, like that.

The new tarred road cuts off some of the bends of the old one, and when I got near the river I began to think I'd overshot the turnoff to Inkalamu's place. But no. There it was, the long avenue of jacarandas plunging into the hilly valley, made unfamiliar because of a clearing beside the main road and a cottage and little store that never used to be there. A store built of concrete blocks, with iron bars on the windows, and a veranda: the kind of thing that the Africans, who used to have to do their buying from Indians and white people, are beginning to go in for in the territory, now. The big mango tree was still there—a homemade sign was nailed to it:
KWACHA BEER ALL BRANDS CIGARETTES.
There were hens, and someone whose bicycle seemed to have collapsed on its side in the heat. I said to him, “Can I go up to the house?”

He came over holding his head to one shoulder, squinting against the flies.

“Is it all right?”

He shook his head.

“Does somebody live in the house, the big house?”

“Is nobody.”

“I can go up and look?”

“You can go.”

Most of the gravel was gone off the drive. There was just a hump in the middle that scraped along the underside of the low American car. The jacarandas were enormous; it was not their blooming time. It was said that Inkalamu Williamson had made this mile-and-a-half-long avenue to his house after the style of the carriage-way in his family estate in England; but it was more likely that, in the elevation of their social status that used to go on in people's minds when they came out to the colonies, his memory of that road to the great house was the village boy's game of imagining himself the owner as he trudged up on an errand. Inkalamu's style was that of the poor boy who has found himself the situation in which he can play at being the lordly eccentric, far from aristocrats who wouldn't so much as know he existed, and the jeers of his own kind.

I saw this now; I saw everything, now, as it had always been, and not as it had seemed to us in the time when we were children. As I came in sight of the shrubbery in front of the house, I saw that the red amaryllis, because they were indigenous anyway, continued to bloom without care or cultivation. Everything else was blurred with overgrowth. And there was the house itself: sagging under its own weight, the thatch over the dormer windows sliding towards the long grass it came from. I felt no nostalgia, only recognition.

It was a red mud house, as all our houses were then, in the early thirties, but Inkalamu had rather grandly defied the limitations of mud by building it three storeys tall, a sandcastle reproduction of a large, calendar-picture English country house, with steep thatch curving and a wide chimney at either end, and a flight of steps up to a portico. Everyone had said it would fall down on his head; it had lasted thirty years. His mango and orange trees crowded in upon it from the sides of the valley. There was the profound silence of a deserted man-made place—the silence of absence.

I tried to walk a little way into the mango grove, but year after year the crop must have been left to fall and rot, and between the rows of old trees hundreds of spindly saplings had grown up from seed, making a dark wood. I hadn't thought of going into the house, but walked around it to look for the view down the valley to the mountains that was on the other side; the rains had washed a moat at the foot of the eroded walls and I had to steady myself by holding on to the rusty elbows of plumbing that stuck out. The house was intimately close to me, like a body. The lopsided wooden windows on the ground floor with their tin panes, the windows of the second floor with their panes of wire mesh, hung half-open like the mouths of old people asleep. I found I could not get all the way round because the bush on the valley side had grown right to the walls, and instead I tried to pull myself up and look inside. Both the mud and wattle gave way under my feet, the earth mixture crumbling and the supporting structure—branches of trees neither straightened nor dressed—that it had plastered, collapsing, hollowed by ants. The house had not fallen on Inkalamu and his black children (as the settlers had predicted) but I felt I might pull it down upon myself. Wasps hovered at my mouth and eyes, as if they, too, wanted to look inside: me. Inkalamu's house, that could have housed at least ten people, was not enough for them.

At the front again, I went up the steps where we used to sit scratching noughts and crosses while my father was in the house. Not that our families had been friends; only the children, which didn't count—my father and mother were white, my father a member of the Legislative Assembly, and Inkalamu's wives were native women. Sometimes my father would pay a call on Inkalamu, in the way of business (Inkalamu, as well as being a trader and hunter—the Africans had given him the name Inkalamu, “the lion”—was a big landowner, once) but my mother never accompanied him. When my brothers and I came by ourselves, Inkalamu's children never took us to the house; it didn't seem to be
their
home in the way that our small farmhouse was our home, and perhaps their father didn't know that we came occasionally, on our own, to play, any more than our mother and father knew we secretly went there. But when we were with my father—there was a special attraction about going to that house openly, with him—we were always called in, after business was concluded, by Inkalamu Williamson, their white father, with his long yellow curly hair on to his shoulders, like Jesus, and his sun-red chest and belly folded one upon the other and visible through his unbuttoned shirt. He gave us sweets while those of his own children who had slipped inside stood in the background. We did not feel awkward, eating in front of them, for they were all shades of brown and yellow-brown, quite different from Inkalamu and my father and us.

Someone had tied the two handles of the double front door with a piece of dirty rag to prevent it from swinging open, but I looped the rag off with a stick, and it was easy to push the door and go in. The place was not quite empty. A carpenter's bench with a vise stood in the hall, some shelves had been wrenched from the wall and stood on the floor, through the archway into the sitting room I saw a chair and papers. At first I thought someone might still be living there. It was dim inside and smelled of earth, as always. But when my eyes got accustomed to the dark I saw that the parts of the vise were welded together in rust and a frayed strip was all that was left on the rexine upholstery of the chair. Bat and mouse droppings carpeted the floor. Piles of books looked as if they had been dumped temporarily during a spring cleaning; when I opened one the pages were webbed together by mould and the fine granules of red earth brought by the ants.

The Tale of a Tub. Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
Little old Everymans, mixed up with the numbers of
The Farmer's Weekly
and
Titbits.
This room with its crooked alcoves moulded out of mud and painted pink and green, and its pillars worm-tracked with mauve and blue by someone who had never seen marble to suggest marble to people who did not know what it was—it had never looked habitable. Inkalamu's rolltop desk, stuffed like a pigeon loft with accounts ready to take off in any draught, used to stand on one of the uneven-boarded landings that took up more space than the dingy coop of rooms. Here in the sitting room he would perform formalities like the distribution of sweets to us children. I don't think anyone had ever actually sat between the potted ferns and read before a real fire in that fireplace. The whole house, inside, had been curiously uninhabitable; it looked almost the real thing, but within it was not the Englishman's castle but a naive artifact, an African mud-and-wattle dream—like the VC10 made of mealie stalks that a small African boy was hawking round the airport when I arrived the previous week.

A grille of light gleamed through the board over my head. When Inkalamu went upstairs to fetch something, his big boots would send red sand down those spaces between the boards. He was always dressed in character, with leather leggings, and the cloudy-faced old watch on his huge round wrist held by a strap made of snakeskin. I went back into the hall and had a look at the stairs. They seemed all right, except for a few missing steps. The banisters made of the handrails of an old tram-car were still there, and as I climbed, flakes of the aluminium paint that had once covered them stuck to my palms. I had forgotten how ugly the house was upstairs, but I suppose I hadn't been up very often; it was never clear whether Inkalamu's children actually lived in the house with him or slept down at the kraal with their mothers. I think his favourite daughters lived with him sometimes—anyway, they wore shoes, and used to have ribbons for their hair, rather pretty hair, reddish-dun and curly as bubbles; I hadn't understood when I was about six and my brothers rolled on the floor giggling when I remarked that I wished I had hair like the Williamson girls. But I soon grew old enough to understand, and I used to recount the story and giggle, too.

The upstairs rooms were murmurous with wasps and the little windows were high as those of a prison cell. How good that it was all being taken apart by insects, washed away by the rain, disappearing into the earth, carried away and digested, fragmented to compost. I was glad that Inkalamu's children were free of it, that none of them was left here in this house of that “character” of the territory, the old Africa hand whose pioneering spirit had kept their mothers down in the compound and allowed the children into the house like pets. I was glad that the school where they weren't admitted when
we
were going to school was open to their children, and our settlers' club that they could never have joined was closed, and that if I met them now they would understand as I did that when I was the child who stood and ate sweets under their eyes, both they and I were what our fathers, theirs and mine, had made of us . . . And here I was in Inkalamu Williamson's famous bathroom, the mark of his civilization, and the marvel of the district because those very pipes sticking out of the outside walls that I had clung to represented a feat of plumbing. The lavatory pan had been taken away but the little tank with its tail of chain was still on the wall, bearing green tears of verdigris. No one had bothered to throw his medicines away. He must have had a year or two of decline before he died, there must have been an end to the swaggering and the toughness and the hunting trips and the strength of ten men: medicines had been dispensed from afar, they bore the mouldering labels of pharmacists in towns thousands of miles away—Mr. Williamson, the mixture, the pills, three times a day; when necessary; for pain. I was glad that the Williamsons were rid of their white father, and could live. Suddenly, I beat on one of the swollen windows with my fist and it flung open.

The sight there, the silence of it, smoking heat, was a hand laid to quiet me. Right up to the house the bush had come, the thorn trees furry with yellow blossom, the overlapping umbrellas of rose, plum and green
msasa,
the shouldering mahogany with castanet pods, and far up on either side, withdrawn, moon-mountainous, the granite peaks, lichen-spattered as if the roc perched there and left its droppings. The exaltation of emptiness was taken into my lungs. I opened my mouth and received it. Good God, that valley!