Life Times Stories

Life Times Stories - By Nadine Gordimer



The Soft Voice of the Serpent


He was only twenty-six and very healthy and he was soon strong enough to be wheeled out into the garden. Like everyone else, he had great and curious faith in the garden: ‘Well, soon you’ll be up and able to sit out in the garden,’ they said, looking at him fervently, with little understanding tilts of the head. Yes, he would be out . . . in the garden. It was a big garden enclosed in old, dark, sleek, pungent firs, and he could sit deep beneath their tiered fringes, down in the shade, far away. There was the feeling that there, in the garden, he would come to an understanding; that it would come easier there. Perhaps there was something in this of the old Eden idea; the tender human adjusting himself to himself in the soothing impersonal presence of trees and grass and earth, before going out into the stare of the world.

The very first time it was so strange; his wife was wheeling him along the gravel path in the sun and the shade, and he felt exactly as he did when he was a little boy and he used to bend and hang, looking at the world upside down, through his ankles. Everything was vast and open, the sky, the wind blowing along through the swaying, trembling greens, the flowers shaking in vehement denial. Movement . . .

A first slight wind lifted again in the slack, furled sail of himself; he felt it belly gently, so gently he could just feel it, lifting inside him.

So she wheeled him along, pushing hard and not particularly well with her thin pretty arms – but he would not for anything complain of the way she did it or suggest that the nurse might do better, for he knew that would hurt her – and when they came to a spot that he liked, she put the brake on the chair and settled him there for the morning. That was the first time and now he sat there every day. He read a lot, but his attention was arrested sometimes, quite suddenly and compellingly, by the sunken place under the rug where his leg used to be. There was his one leg, and next to it, the rug flapped loose. Then looking, he felt his leg not there; he felt it go, slowly, from the toe to the thigh. He felt that he had no leg. After a few minutes he went back to his book. He never let the realisation quite reach him; he let himself realise it physically, but he never quite let it get at him. He felt it pressing up, coming, coming, dark, crushing, ready to burst – but he always turned away, just in time, back to his book. That was his system; that was the way he was going to do it. He would let it come near, irresistibly near, again and again, ready to catch him alone in the garden. And again and again he would turn it back, just in time. Slowly it would become a habit, with the reassuring strength of a habit. It would become such a habit never to get to the point of realising it, that he would never realise it. And one day he would find that he had achieved what he wanted: he would feel as if he had always been like that.

Then the danger would be over, for ever.

In a week or two he did not have to read all the time; he could let himself put down the book and look about him, watching the firs part silkily as a child’s fine straight hair in the wind, watching the small birds tightroping the telephone wire, watching the fat old dove trotting after his refined patrician grey women, purring with lust. His wife came and sat beside him, doing her sewing, and sometimes they spoke, but often they sat for hours, a whole morning, her movements at work small and unobtrusive as the birds’, he resting his head back and looking at a blur of sky through half-closed eyes. Now and then her eye, habitually looking inwards, would catch the signal of some little happening, some point of colour in the garden, and her laugh or exclamation drawing his attention to it would suddenly clear away the silence. At eleven o’clock she would get up and put down her sewing and go into the house to fetch their tea; crunching slowly away into the sun up the path, going easily, empowered by the sun rather than her own muscles. He watched her go, easily . . . He was healing. In the static quality of his gaze, in the relaxed feeling of his mouth, in the upward-lying palm of his hand, there was annealment . . .

One day a big locust whirred dryly past her head, and she jumped up with a cry, scattering her sewing things. He laughed at her as she bent about picking them up, shuddering. She went into the house to fetch the tea, and he began to read. But presently he put down the book and, yawning, noticed a reel of pink cotton that she had missed, lying in a rose bed.

He smiled, remembering her. And then he became conscious of a curious old-mannish little face, fixed upon him in a kind of hypnotic dread. There, absolutely stilled with fear beneath his glance, crouched a very big locust. What an amusing face the thing had! A lugubrious long face, that somehow suggested a bald head, and such a glum mouth. It looked like some little person out of a Disney cartoon. It moved slightly, still looking up fearfully at him. Strange body, encased in a sort of old-fashioned creaky armour. He had never realised before what ridiculous-looking insects locusts were! Well, naturally not; they occur to one collectively, as a pest – one doesn’t go around looking at their faces.

The face was certainly curiously human and even expressive, but looking at the body, he decided that the body couldn’t really be called a body at all. With the face, the creature’s kinship with humans ended. The body was flimsy paper stretched over a frame of matchstick, like a small boy’s home-made aeroplane. And those could not be thought of as legs – the great saw-toothed back ones were like the parts of an old crane, and the front ones like – like one of her hairpins, bent in two. At that moment the creature slowly lifted up one of the front legs, and passed it tremblingly over its head, stroking the left antenna down. Just as a man might take out a handkerchief and pass it over his brow.

He began to feel enormously interested in the creature, and leaned over in his chair to see it more closely. It sensed him and beneath its stiff, plated sides, he was surprised to see the pulsations of a heart. How fast it was breathing . . . He leaned away a little, to frighten it less.

Watching it carefully, and trying to keep himself effaced from its consciousness by not moving, he became aware of some struggle going on in the thing. It seemed to gather itself together in muscular concentration: this coordinated force then passed along its body in a kind of petering tremor, and ended in a stirring along the upward shaft of the great black legs. But the locust remained where it was. Several times this wave of effort currented through it and was spent, but the next time it ended surprisingly in a few hobbling, uneven steps, undercarriage – aeroplane-like again – trailing along the earth.

Then the creature lay, fallen on its side, antennae turned stretched out towards him. It groped with its hands, feeling for a hold on the soft ground, bending its elbows and straining. With a heave, it righted itself, and as it did so, he saw – leaning forward again – what was the trouble. It was the same trouble. His own trouble. The creature had lost one leg. Only the long upward shaft of its left leg remained, with a neat round aperture where, no doubt, the other half of the leg had been jointed in.

Now as he watched the locust gather itself again and again in that concentration of muscle, spend itself again and again in a message that was so puzzlingly never obeyed, he knew exactly what the creature felt. Of course he knew that feeling! That absolute certainty that the leg was there: one had only to lift it . . . The upward shaft of the locust’s leg quivered, lifted; why then couldn’t he walk? He tried again. The message came; it was going, through, the leg was lifting, now it was ready – now! . . . The shaft sagged in the air, with nothing, nothing to hold it up.

He laughed and shook his head: he knew . . . Good Lord, exactly like – he called out to the house – ‘Come quickly! Come and see! You’ve got another patient!’

‘What?’ she shouted. ‘I’m getting tea.’

‘Come and look!’ he called. ‘Now!’

‘. . . What is it?’ she said, approaching the locust distastefully.

‘Your locust!’ he said. She jumped away with a little shriek.

‘Don’t worry – it can’t move. It’s as harmless as I am. You must have knocked its leg off when you hit out at it!’ He was laughing at her.

‘Oh, I didn’t!’ she said reproachfully. She loathed it but she loathed to hurt, even more. ‘I never even touched it! All I hit was air . . . I couldn’t possibly have hit it. Not its leg off.’

‘All right then. It’s another locust. But it’s lost its leg, anyway. You should just see it . . . It doesn’t know the leg isn’t there. God, I know exactly how that feels . . . I’ve been watching it, and honestly, it’s uncanny. I can see it feels just like I do!’

She smiled at him, sideways; she seemed suddenly pleased at something. Then, recalling herself, she came forward, bent double, hands upon her hips.

‘Well, if it can’t move . . .’ she said, hanging over it.

‘Don’t be frightened,’ he laughed. ‘Touch it.’

‘Ah, the poor thing,’ she said, catching her breath in compassion. ‘It can’t walk.’

‘Don’t encourage it to self-pity,’ he teased her.

She looked up and laughed. ‘Oh you – ’ she parried, assuming a frown. The locust kept its solemn silly face turned to her. ‘Shame, isn’t he a funny old man,’ she said. ‘But what will happen to him?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, for being in the same boat absolved him from responsibility or pity. ‘Maybe he’ll grow another one. Lizards grow new tails, if they lose them.’

‘Oh, lizards,’ she said. ‘ – but not these. I’m afraid the cat’ll get him.’

‘Get another little chair made for him and you can wheel him out here with me.’

‘Yes,’ she laughed. ‘Only for him it would have to be a kind of little cart, with wheels.’

‘Or maybe he could be taught to use crutches. I’m sure the farmers would like to know that he was being kept active.’

‘The poor old thing,’ she said, bending over the locust again. And reaching back somewhere into an inquisitive childhood she picked up a thin wand of twig and prodded the locust, very gently. ‘Funny thing is, it’s even the same leg, the left one.’ She looked round at him and smiled.

‘I know,’ he nodded, laughing. ‘The two of us . . .’ And then he shook his head and, smiling, said it again: ‘The two of us.’

She was laughing and just then she flicked the twig more sharply than she meant to and at the touch of it there was a sudden flurried papery whirr, and the locust flew away.

She stood there with the stick in her hand, half afraid of it again, and appealed, unnerved as a child, ‘What happened? What happened?’

There was a moment of silence.

‘Don’t be a fool,’ he said irritably.

They had forgotten that locusts can fly.