Nadine Gordimer
South African writer Nadine Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991. This excerpt is from “My Father Leaves Home,” in ‘‘Jump and Other Stories,” published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 1991.
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.