THE QUIET POWER OF NADINE GORDIMER
Author:
Date: Sunday, October 6, 1991
Page: A18
Section: BOOKS
South African writer Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature on Thursday. This excerpt is from "My Father Leaves Home," in
''Jump and Other Stories," just published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
At four in the afternoon the old moon bleeds radiance into the grey sky. In
the wood a thick plumage of fallen oak leaves is laid reverentially as the
feathers of the dead pheasants swinging from the beaters' belts. The beaters
are coming across the great fields of maize in the first light of the moon.
The guns probe its halo. Where I wait, apart, out of the way, hidden, I hear
the rustle of fear among creatures. Their feathers swish against stalks and
leaves. The clucking to gather in the young; the spurting squawks of terror as
the men with their thrashing sticks drive the prey racing on, rushing this way
and that, no way where there are not men and sticks, men and guns. . . .
Six leaves from my father's country.
When I began to know him, in his shop, as someone distinct from a lap I sat
on, he shouted at the black man on the other side of the counter who swept the
floor and ran errands, and he threw the man's weekly pay grudgingly at him. I
saw there was someone my father had made afraid of him. A child understands
fear, and the hurt and hate it brings.
I gathered the leaves for their pretty autumn stains, not out of any
sentiment. This village where we've rented the State hunting lodge is not my
father's village. I don't know where, in his country, it was, only the name
of the port at which he left it behind. I didn't ask him about his village.
He never told me; or I didn't listen. I have the leaves in my hand. I did
not know that I would find, here in the wood, the beaters advancing, advancing
across the world.
CAMPBE;10/03 NKELLY;10/07,15:01 GORDADD
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