topics: |  fiction | south-africa

12 very short stories set in South Africa. Like most of Gordimer's short
fiction, they are about the various ways -- change, acceptance, avoidance --
in which individuals cope with the society they live in.

1. A SOLDIER'S EMBRACE 7

Opens with the celebrations following the ANC victory in the S. African
civil war; the white soldiers - "peasant boys from Europe" were
swarming the streets along with the black soldiers.  The white urban
lawyer's wife encounters them on her way back after telegraphing
home, the moment engraved in rich detail:

	    There were two soldiers in front of her, blocking her off by
	    their clumsy embrace (how do you do it, how do you do what you've
	    never done before) and the embrace opened like a door and took
	    her in -- a pink hand with bitten nails grasping her right arm, a
	    black hand with a big-dialled watch and thong bracelet pulling at
	    her left elbow.  Theit three heads collided gaily, musk of sweat
	    and tang of strong sweet soap clapped a mask to her nose and
	    mouth.  They all gasped wityh delicious shock.  She put up an arm
	    around each neck, the rough pile of an army haircut onj one side,
	    the soft negro hair on the other, and kissed them both on the
	    cheek.  The embrace broke. p.8

	She moves away, the incident fades, the story turns to the lawyer's
	career now that he would not be fighting liberal cases for the blacks
	against the unjust regime.  Three pages later, however, the story
	returns to her, with a faint trace of guilt.  The newspapers are
	saying how a few days earlier, these very same soldiers might have
	been expected to rape her.

	    She had not kissed on the mouth, she had not sought anonymous
	    lips and tongues in the licence of festival.  Yet she had kissed.
	    Watching herself again, she knew that. ... She did not tell what
	    happened not because her husband would suspect licence in
	    her... 11

	The narrative focuses on the unstable world around them, how a boy
	from the slums that the lawyer had helped in the past has become a
	big honcho in the new dispensation - he comes to dinner but appears
	distant.  The lawyer doesn't have cases any more - there is talk
	about his joining the law department at the university but nothing
	comes of it.  Their gardener, Muchanga, an iconoclast himself, holds
	conclave with his pals from the slums, where there is looting going
	on.  Eventually the lawyer is offered a position in a neighbouring
	white regime, where he can continue fighting liberal cases against
	the oppressive regime.  As they are arranging to move, Chipande shows
	up suddenly, remonstrating with them to stay back, but he has nothing
	real to offer.  The embrace is never talked about further, but at the
	end of the meager 14 pages, it hangs on in the mind like the vivid
	backdrop of a quiet play.

	 NYT review:
	 a white activist lawyer and his wife pay homage to the black
	 nationalist government that displaces the colonial regime they've
	 been fighting for years -- but it doesn't take them long to realize
	 they're more comfortable having a colonial regime to fight against
	 than they are living in a place where their pipe dream has come true.
	  (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CE1DE113EF931A35755C0A967958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all)

2. A LION ON THE FREEWAY 23

A lyrical piece, more a prose poem than a short story.  The story
does describe some things - that a lion's roar is not a roar at
all, more like a deep panting.  Why they feel the need to roar,
always at night, often just before dawn, their experience being
raised in the zoo...

	    Open up!
	    Open up!
	    What hammered on the doors of sleep!
	    Who's that?

	Anyone who lives within a mile of the zoo hears lions on summer
	nights.  A tourist could be fooled.  Africa already; at last, even
	though he went to bed in yet another metropole.
	   Just before light, when it's supposed to be darkest, the body's at
	its lowest ebb and in the hospital on the hill old people die - the
	night opens, a Black hole between stars, and from it comes a deep
	panting.  Very distant and at once very close, right in the year, for
	the sound of breath is always intimate.  It grows and gorws, a rising
	groan lifs out of the curved bars of the cage and hangs above the
	whole city --
	    And then it drops back, sinks away, becomes panting again.
	    Wait for it; it will fall so quiet, hardly more than a faint
	roughness snagging the air in the ear's chambers. ... And begins once
	more.  The panting reaches up up up down down down to that awe-ful
	groan!

	    Open up!
	    Open up!
	    Open your legs.

	...
	The zoo lions do no utter during the day.  They yawn; wait for their
	ready-slaughtered kill to be tossed at them; keep their unused claws
	sheathed in huge harmless pads on which top-heavy, untidy heads
	rest,... gazing through lid-slats with what zoo visitors think of in
	sentimental prurience as yearning.

	Or once we were near the Baltic and the leviathan hooted from the
	night fog at sea.  But would I dare to open my mouth now?  Could I
	trust my breath to be sweet, these stale nights?

	It's only on warm summer nights that the lions are restless. What
	they're seeing when they gaze during the day is nothing, their eyes
	are open but they don't see us -- you can tell that when the lens of
	the pupil suddenlys shutters at the close swoop0 of one of the
	popcorn-begging pigeons through the bars of the cage. ... It's only
	on certain nights that their muscles flex and they begin to pant,
	their flanks heave as if they had been running through the dark night
	while other creatures shrank from their path, their jaws hang tense
	and wet as saliva flows as if in response to a scent of prey, at last
	they heave up their too-big heads, heavy, heavy heads, and out it
	comes.  Out over the suburbs. A dreadful straining of the bowels to
	deliver itself; a groan that hangs above the houses in a low-lying
	cloud of smog and anguish.

3. SIBLINGS 29

Maxine is the wild one in the family. Several drug
rehabilitations behind her, her wrists are scarred by the many times
she's attempted to slash them.  By 19, she's almost beyond the pale
of help, and the discourse in her aunt's house is about how she'll
drive her mother mad.  His cousin, 15, is the protagonist, and the
story ripples along with how he discovers her place, and then it's
her birthday, so his mother wants to give a gift to her niece.  The
story climaxes with Maxine in their house, and she has to try out her
birthday dress right there, in front of him:

    [She's already removed her pants]
    Lifting her arms and crossing each hand to the opposite shoulder
    so that her forearms momentarily hid her face, she pulled off her
    T-shirt as roughly, dragging up with it two brown, dark-centered
    circles that sprang helplessly back into place again.  She was
    naked.
    [Then she opens the buttons of the new dress.  What if the
    gardener walkis past the window or the half-ajar door?  ]
        He had never seen a naked woman before. - 42
4. TIME DID 45
5. A HUNTING ACCIDENT 55
6. FOR DEAR LIFE 67
7. TOWN AND COUNTRY LOVERS: One 73

Town Lovers: A story of a love affair between the urbane foreign
geologist and the black girl who has recently gotten an
opportunity to work in a grocery store.  They start living
together but this is of course against the laws of the land.

8. TOWN AND COUNTRY LOVERS: Two 85

Country Lovers: white boy and black girl

    The farm children play together when they are small; but once the
    white children go away to school they soon don't play together
    any more, even in the holidays.  Although most of the black
    children get some sort of schooling, they drop every year farther
    behind the grades passed by the white children; the childish
    vocabulary, the child's exploration of the adventurous
    possibilities ... [the white children's] vocabulary of boarding
    school and the possibilities of inter-school sports matches and
    the kind of adventures seen at the cinema.  This usefully
    coincides with the age of twelve or thirteen... 86

Yet Paulus Eysendyck continues his friendship with Thebedi, and they
eventually become lovers in his fifteenth year, by which time he has
been exposed to women from the "sister-school".  This continues in
the summer of that eighteenth year, when he's in vet school, and she
gets pregnant but doesn't tell him.  Indeed, she is about to get
married, and within two months has a baby who is pale in colour, with
gray eyes.  The following summer, he visits her married home and sees
the baby:

	"You haven't been near the house with it?"
	She shook her head.
	"Never?"
	Again she shook her head.
	"Don't take it out.  Stay inside.  Can't you take it away
    somewhere.  You must give it to someone --"
	She moved to the door with him.

Two days later, he comes back, and kills the child (possibly
poisoning "it").  Later the case is taken up by the police - how did
the baby - almost white but healthy - suddenly die?  Pathological
tests.  Case comes up in court.  The defence does not contest the
relationship, but said there was no proof that the child was the
accused's.  The judge said that there was not enough evidence, and
lets him off.

9. A MAD ONE 95

Another dysfunctional relative - this time the brother's wife.  The elderly
couple are drawn in rapid vivid strokes; he takes off his teeth at night, and
his wife's dread that he may seem ungainly if he talks in this state; the
brother and sister fighting over how to deal with this aunt, and the other
dysfunctional member - his father's step mother.

10 YOU NAME IT 105
11 THE TERMITARY 113
12 THE NEED FOR SOMETHING SWEET 121
13 ORAL HISTORY 133