Life Times by Nadine Gordimer

one by one under the tap in the sink. Billy Boy and Albert had come closer out of the shadows and were leaning their elbows on a roll of paper. Temba was sitting on the table, swinging his foot. Maxie had not moved, and stood just as he had, with his arms folded. No one spoke.
    Jake began to whistle softly through the spaces between his front teeth, and he picked up the pan of bacon, looked at the twisted curls of meat, jellied now in cold white fat, and put it down again absently. He stood a moment, heavily, regarding them all, but no one responded. His eye encountered the chair that he had cleared for Jennifer Tetzel to sit on. Suddenly he kicked it, hard, so that it went flying on to its side. Then, rubbing his big hands together and bursting into loud whistling to accompany an impromptu series of dance steps, he said ‘Now, boys!’ and as they stirred, he plonked the pan down on the ring and turned the gas up till it roared beneath it.

The Smell of Death and Flowers
    T he party was an unusual one for Johannesburg. A young man called Derek Ross—out of sight behind the ‘bar’ at the moment—had white friends and black friends, Indian friends and friends of mixed blood, and sometimes he liked to invite them to his flat all at once. Most of them belonged to the minority that, through bohemianism, godliness, politics, or a particularly sharp sense of human dignity, did not care about the difference in one another’s skins. But there were always one or two – white ones – who came, like tourists, to see the sight, and to show that they did not care, and one or two black or brown or Indian ones who found themselves paralysed by the very ease with which the white guests accepted them.
    One of the several groups that huddled to talk, like people sheltering beneath a cliff, on divans and hard borrowed chairs in the shadow of the dancers, was dominated by a man in a grey suit, Malcolm Barker. ‘Why not pay the fine and have done with it, then?’ he was saying.
    The two people to whom he was talking were silent a moment, so that the haphazard noisiness of the room and the organised wail of the gramophone suddenly burst in irrelevantly upon the conversation. The pretty brunette said, in her quick, officious voice, ‘Well, it wouldn’t be the same for Jessica Malherbe. It’s not quite the same thing, you see . . .’ Her stiff, mascaraed lashes flickered an appeal – for confirmation, and for sympathy because of the impossibility of explaining – at a man whose gingerish whiskers and flattened, low-set ears made him look like an angry tomcat.
    â€˜It’s a matter of principle,’ he said to Malcolm Barker.
    â€˜Oh, quite, I see,’ Malcolm conceded. ‘For someone like this Malherbe woman, paying the fine’s one thing; sitting in prison for three weeks is another.’
    The brunette rapidly crossed and then uncrossed her legs. ‘It’s not even quite that,’ she said. ‘Not the unpleasantness of being in prison. Not a sort of martyrdom on Jessica’s part. Just the principle .’ At that moment a black hand came out from the crush of dancers bumping round and pulled the woman to her feet; she went off, and as she danced she talked with staccato animation to her African partner, who kept his lids half lowered over his eyes while she followed his gentle shuffle. The ginger-whiskered man got up without a word and went swiftly through the dancers to the ‘bar’, a kitchen table covered with beer and gin bottles, at the other end of the small room.
    â€˜ Satyagraha ,’ said Malcolm Barker, like the infidel pronouncing with satisfaction the holy word that the believers hesitate to defile.
    A very large and plain African woman sitting next to him smiled at him hugely and eagerly out of shyness, not having the slightest idea what he had said.
    He smiled back at her for a moment, as if to hypnotise the onrush of some