“That rug!” she said, getting up to her feet again. “Always so dangerous! Fancy, a second time, just the same like the poor wife!”
She grinned with brutal complacence into the heavy white face with its look of dead despair. “So lucky that this time I was present, to see that it all was again just a terrible accident.”
Raymond’s jacket had fallen open. She stooped and with fastidious fingers picked out the wad of notes and stuffed them into her apron pocket.
“Just a verry, verrry small beginning,” she quoted and took the poker out of Rosa’s inert hand. “Go back to your flat, Madame.
Collapse upon your bed. I see to everything, then I make telephone to the doctor.” The Trudi shrug. “This time I know the number of him.”
Rosa went back to her own apartment. She did not, however, collapse upon her bed.
“Police?” she said, holding the telephone receiver in a steady hand.
She gave Raymond Gray’s address. “You’d better get over there quick. I’ve just seen from my balcony the au pair girl going for him with a poker. And this time — no question of an accident.”
She listened with a satisfied smile to a sharp voice cracking out orders. The voice returned to her. “Well, I wouldn’t know about that — I can’t see to the floor of the room. The girl disappeared from sight for a bit and when she got up she was stuffing money into her apron pocket. You’ll find it, I daresay, hidden somewhere in her room. An affair going on, you know, even before the poor wife died; and now I suppose he was refusing to marry her.”
Country Lovers
NADINE GORDIMER
Nobel Prize winner Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923) was born in the gold mining region of South Africa, the daughter of a jeweler. Receiving her early education at a convent, she graduated from University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Like many writers, she was solitary as a child, out of school from the age of eleven to sixteen because of an apparently imaginary heart ailment, her only companions her mother and her adult friends, with no contact with other children. First published at the age of fifteen, she eventually contributed short stories to such major U.S. markets as The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Mademoiselle. Her first story collection, The Soft Voice of the Serpent and Other Stories, appeared in 1952, her first novel, The Lying Days, in 1955. Her views on racial equality and her celebration of human variety, which eventually led to outspoken opposition to her country’s apartheid policies, she credited to her reading rather than any example from her apolitical parents. She listed as one of her favorite writers J. D. Salinger, another specialist in depicting the societal outsider.
Gordimer wrote critically of the South African regime in both fiction and non-fiction. One of her novels, Burger’s Daughter (1979), was briefly banned in her home country. A Time magazine reviewer of her second novel, A World of Strangers (1958), as quoted in Current Biography (1959 yearbook), wrote that Gordimer “not only tells the truth about her countrymen, but she tells it so well that she has become at once their goad and their best writer.” Surely, her conscientious opposition, along with that of other South African writers and thinkers, was a factor in the eventual end of apartheid.
Generally, Gordimer is not regarded even tangentially as a writer of crime fiction, but “Country Lovers,” a painfully real story that reflects her concern about her country’s policies while confronting some basic truths about racism, certainly qualifies for the category.
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 further behind the grades passed by the white children; the childish vocabulary, the child’s exploration of the adventurous possibilities of dam, koppies, mealie lands and veld — there comes a time when the white children have surpassed these with the vocabulary of boarding-schools 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; so that by the time early adolescence is reached, the black children are making, along with the bodily changes common to all, an easy transition to adult forms of address, beginning to call their old playmates missus and baasie—little master.
The trouble was Paulus Eysendyck did not seem to realize that Thebedi was now simply one of the crowd of farm children down at the kraal, recognizable in his sisters’ old clothes. The first Christmas holidays after he had gone to boarding-school he brought home for Thebedi a painted box he had made in his woodwork class. He had to give it to her secretly because he had nothing for the other children at the kraal. And she gave him, before he went back to school, a bracelet she had made of thin brass wire and the grey-and-white beans of the castor-oil crop his father cultivated. (When they used to play together, she was the one who had taught Paulus how to make clay oxen for their toy spans.) There was a craze, even in the platteland towns like the one where he was at school, for boys to wear elephant-hair and other bracelets beside their watch-straps; his was admired, friends asked him to get similar ones for them. He said the natives made them on his father’s farm and he would try.
When he was fifteen, six feet tall, and tramping round at school dances with the girls from the “sister” school in the same town; when he had learnt how to tease and flirt and fondle quite intimately these girls who were the daughters of prosperous farmers like his father; when he had even met one who, at a wedding he had attended with his parents on a nearby farm, had let him do with her in a locked storeroom what people did when they made love — when he was as far from his childhood as all this, he still brought home from a shop in town a red plastic belt and gilt hoop earrings for the black girl, Thebedi. She told her father the missus had given these to her as a reward for some work she had done — it was true she sometimes was called to help out in the farmhouse. She told the girls in the kraal that she had a sweetheart nobody knew about, far away, away on another farm, and they giggled, and teased, and admired her.
There was a boy in the kraal called Njabulo who said he wished he could have bought her a belt and earrings.
When the farmer’s son was home for the holidays she wandered far from the kraal and her companions. He went for walks alone.
They had not arranged this; it was an urge each followed independently. He knew it was she, from a long way off. She knew that his dog would not bark at her. Down at the dried-up riverbed where five or six years ago the children had caught a leguaan one great day — a creature that combined ideally the size and ferocious aspect of the crocodile with the harmlessness of the lizard — they squatted side by side on the earth bank. He told her traveler’s tales: about school, about the punishments at school, particularly, exaggerating both their nature and his indifference to them. He told her about the town of Middleburg, which she had never seen. She had nothing to tell but she prompted with many questions, like any good listener.
While he talked he twisted and tugged at the roots of white stink-wood and Cape willow trees that looped out of the eroded earth around them. It had always been a good spot for children’s games, down there hidden by the mesh of old, ant-eaten trees held in place by vigorous ones, wild asparagus bushing up between the trunks, and here and there prickly-pear cactus sunken-skinned and bristly, like an old man’s face, keeping alive sapless until the next rainy season. She punctured the dry hide of a prickly-pear again and again with a sharp stick while she listened.