(Nadine Gordimer – 1991)
Someone
has written to ask me to contribute to an anthology of stories for children. I
reply that I don’t write children’s stories; and he writes back that at a
recent congress/book fair/ seminar a certain novelist said every writer ought
to write at least one story for children. I think of sending a postcard saying
I don’t accept that i ‘ought’ to write anything.
And then last night I woke up – or
rather was wakened without knowing what had roused me.
A voice in the echo-chamber of the
subconcious?
A sound.
A creaking of the kind made by the
weight carried by one foot after another along a wooden floor. I listened. I
felt the apertures of my ears distend with concentration. Again: the creaking.
I was waiting for it; waiting to hear if it indicated that feet were moving
from room to room, coming up the passage–to my door. I have no burglar bars, no
gun under the pillow, but I have the same fears as people who do burglar bars,
no gun under the pillow, but I have the same fears as people who do take these
precautions, and my windowpanes are thin as rime, could shatter like a
wineglass. A woman was murdered (how do they put it) in broad daylight in a
house two blocks away, last year, and the fierce dogs who guarded an old
widower and his collection of antique clocks were strangled before he was
knifed by casual labourer he had dismissed without pay.
I was staring at the door, making it
out in my mind rather than seeing it, in a dark. I lay quite still--a victim already-- but the arrhythmia of my heart was fleeing, knocking this
way and that against its body-cage. How finely tuned the senses are, just out
of rest, sleep! I could never listen intently as that the distractions of the
day; I was reading every faintest sound, identifying and classifying its
possible threat.
But I learned that I was to be
neither threatened nor spared. There was no human weight pressing on the
boards, the creaking was a buckling, an epicenter of stress. I was in it. The
house that surrounds me while I sleep is built on undermined ground; far beneath
my bed, the floor, the house’s foundations, the stages and passages of gold
mines have hollowed the rock, and when some face trembles, detaches and falls,
three thousand feet below, the whole shifts slightly, bringing uneasy strain to
the balance and counterbalance of brick, cement, wood and glass that hold it as
a structure around me. The misbeats of my heart tailed off like the last
muffled flourishes on one of the wooden xylophones made by the Chopi and Tsonga
migrant miners who might have been down there, under me in the earth at the
moment. The stope where the fall was could have been disused, dripping water
from its ruptured veins; or men might now be interred there in the most
profound of tombs.
I couldn’t find a position in which
my mind would let go of my body--