He hasn’t signed on for another job. But he can’t stay at home with us; we thought, after five years over there in the middle of that green and blue sea, so far, he would rest with us a little while. The combi or some car comes to fetch him and he says don’t worry, I don’t know what day I’ll be back. At first I asked, what week, next week? He tried to explain to me: in the Movement it’s not like it was in the union, where you do your work every day and after that you are busy with meetings; in the Movement you never know where you will have to go and what is going to come up next. And the same with money. In the Movement, it’s not like a job, with regular pay — I know that, he doesn’t have to tell me — it’s like it was going to the Island, you do it for all our people who suffer because we haven’t got money, we haven’t got land — look, he said, speaking of my parents’, my home, the home that has been waiting for him, with his child: look at this place where the white man owns the ground and lets you squat in mud and tin huts here only as long as you work for him—Baba and your brother planting his crops and looking after his cattle, Mama cleaning his house and you in the school without even having the chance to train properly as a teacher. The farmer owns us, he says.
I’ve been thinking we haven’t got a home because there wasn’t time to build a house before he came from the Island; but we haven’t got a home at all. Now I’ve understood that.
I’m not stupid. When the comrades come to this place in the combi to talk to him here I don’t go away with my mother after we’ve brought them tea or (if she’s made it for the weekend) beer. They like her beer, they talk about our culture and there’s one of them who makes a point of putting his arm around my mother, calling her the mama of all of them, the mama of Africa. Sometimes they please her very much by telling her how they used to sing on the Island and getting her to sing an old song we all know from our grandmothers. Then they join in with their strong voices. My father doesn’t like this noise travelling across the veld; he’s afraid that if the Boer finds out my man is a political, from the Island, and he’s holding meetings on the Boer’s land, he’ll tell my father to go, and take his family with him. But my brother says if the Boer asks anything just tell him it’s a prayer meeting. Then the singing is over; my mother knows she must go away into the house.
I stay, and listen. He forgets I’m there when he’s talking and arguing about something I can see is important, more important than anything we could ever have to say to each other when we’re alone. But now and then, when one of the other comrades is speaking I see him look at me for a moment the way I will look up at one of my favourite children in school to encourage the child to understand. The men don’t speak to me and I don’t speak. One of the things they talk about is organizing the people on the farms — the workers, like my father and brother, and like his parents used to be. I learn what all these things are: minimum wage, limitation of working hours, the right to strike, annual leave, accident compensation, pensions, sick and even maternity leave. I am pregnant, at last I have another child inside me, but that’s women’s business. When they talk about the Big Man, the Old Men, I know who these are: our leaders are also back from prison. I told him about the child coming; he said, And this one belongs to a new country, he’ll build the freedom we’ve fought for! I know he wants to get married but there’s no time for that at present. There was hardly time for him to make the child. He comes to me just like he comes here to eat a meal or put on clean clothes. Then he picks up the little girl and swings her round and there! — it’s done, he’s getting into the combi, he’s already turning to his comrade that face of his that knows only what’s inside his head, those eyes that move quickly as if he’s chasing something you can’t see. The little girl hasn’t had time to get used to this man. But I know she’ll be proud of him, one day!
How can you tell that to a child six years old. But I tell her about the Big Man and the Old Men, our leaders, so she’ll know that her father was with them on the Island, this man is a great man, too.
On Saturday, no school and I plant and weed with my mother, she sings but I don’t; I think. On Sunday there’s no work, only prayer meetings out of the farmer’s way under the trees, and beer drinks at the mud and tin huts where the farmers allow us to squat on their land. I go off on my own as I used to do when I was a child, making up games and talking to myself where no one would hear me or look for me. I sit on a warm stone in the late afternoon, high up, and the whole valley is a path between the hills, leading away from my feet. It’s the Boer’s farm but that’s not true, it belongs to nobody. The cattle don’t know that anyone says he owns it, the sheep — they are grey stones, and then they become a thick grey snake moving — don’t know. Our huts and the old mulberry tree and the little brown mat of earth that my mother dug over yesterday, way down there, and way over there the clump of trees round the chimneys and the shiny thing that is the TV mast of the farmhouse — they are nothing, on the back of this earth. It could twitch them away like a dog does a fly.
I am up with the clouds. The sun behind me is changing the colours of the sky and the clouds are changing themselves, slowly, slowly. Some are pink, some are white, swelling like bubbles. Underneath is a bar of grey, not enough to make rain. It gets longer and darker, it grows a thin snout and long body and then the end of it is a tail. There’s a huge grey rat moving across the sky, eating the sky.
The child remembered the photo; she said That’s not him. I’m sitting here where I came often when he was on the Island. I came to get away from the others, to wait by myself.
I’m watching the rat, it’s losing itself, its shape, eating the sky, and I’m waiting. Waiting for him to come back.
Waiting.
I’m waiting to come back home.
A Note on the Author
Nadine Gordimer’s many novels include The Lying Days (her first novel), The Conservationist, joint winner of the Booker Prize, Burger’s Daughter, July’s Children, A Guest of Honour, A World of Strangers, My Son’s Story, None to Accompany Me, The House Gun and, most recently, The Pickup. Her collections of short stories include Something Out There, Jump and her most recent work, Loot. In 1991 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. She lives in South Africa.