topics: |  fiction | south-africa

This slim volume of stories was published in 1975, with South Africa very much in the grip of apartheid, though the ANC had made very serious gains. The stories of a black victory seem to come from a border town in Rhodesia or Angola.

The opening story talks of an accidental encounter where the white woman protagonists is caught in an embrace between a white and a black soldier, enemies until yesterday. She kisses them both in the cheek, but something about the physicality of the moment remains a guilty skein in memory...

Excerpts

1. A Soldier's Embrace p.7

Opens with the turbulent celebrations following a "cease-fire" in an unspecified nation. The native black forces appeared to have wrested control from the colonials, and now the white soldiers - "peasant boys from Europe" were swarming the streets along with the blacks. 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.  Their 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 on
	    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 but doesn't die.  

	An accolade, one side a white cheek, the other a black.  The white
	one she kissed on the left cheek, the black one on the right, as if
	these were two sides of one face. p.10

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.

Kirkus reviews: 
	 The gem-like title story focuses on a liberal lawyer's wife who
	 finds herself joining the white exodus from a nation recently turned
	 over to the freedom-fighters. . . but her mind keeps returning to
	 that amazing moment after the cease-fire when she was caught in a
	 mixed crowd of happy soldiers
	  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nadine-gordimer-3/a-soldiers-embrace-stories/

 Michael Upchurch, 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://www.nytimes.com/1991/06/02/books/miniatures-in-black-and-white.html

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.  but it is poetry of a high order.]

	    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

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.

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