Nadine Gordimer - The Late Bourgeois World

Felicity used to hover, importantly self-effacing. ‘I was desperate, d’y’know, he hasn’t turned up all day. I made some excuse to go out and scout around but no one knew where he was.’ She spoke to me out of Max’s earshot, as if he must not hear his condition discussed. Then Spears would arrive, and the casual tone of his excuses and apologies was not altered, whether Max was angry and sulky, or whether he suddenly was in a warm good mood and behaved as though Spears had not been expected until that particular moment. One night when this happened — the arrival of Spears at long last, and a quick rise in Max’s mood — Max was moving about the room like a cork caught up off the sand by the tide, opening beer, offering cheese on the point of a knife, talking, putting papers together, and he pointed the knife at Felicity, saying in a cheerful impatient aside. ‘Come on, move that big arse, Sunbun, you know where you put the list I gave you —’

It was his way of talking to her and I was astonished, this time, to see her cry. I suddenly understood that he had made love to her.

He stood there with the steel blade dulled with the grease of cheese, gesturing at her, and she rushed out of the room with all her flesh — buttocks, breasts — quaking; it was somehow specially moving, as if some poor peaceful browser had been stuck with a spear. I went after her and bumped into Daphne, holding a freshly ironed dress that she must have tried to hand to her. I said quickly, ‘I’ll take it.’

‘What she got to cry for?’ Daphne lifted her chin, she wanted me to know she knew, too.

Max said, ‘She bloody well wouldn’t leave me alone. It started after a party and I was drunk anyway. She smothers you with her bloody great tits, you’ve got to fight your way out and that’s the easiest way.’ It was true that one couldn’t be jealous of Felicity. If she’d been a woman I had been jealous of it would have been different. But there was only one reason why Max made love to her. He knew it and I knew it. He needed approval and admiration so much that he was prepared to throw in a good fuck as payment. I could have forgiven him sleeping with a woman he wanted, but I couldn’t forgive him the humiliation in her big shaking body when she ran out of the room. I used to think of it when we were making love. And I couldn’t tell him because I myself couldn’t give the approval and admiration.

Max shunned the Van Den Sandt’s standards of success but in a way they triumphed in him, passing on, like a family nose or chin, the rage to succeed. He did not weigh in on their scale, but he retained the revengeful need to be acknowledged . It came from them: the desire to show somebody. What? The objects of his purpose were not demonstrable in the way that money and social prestige are. Why is it that these people always win, even if only by destruction?

Oh, there were other women. When he went underground during the State of Emergency in 1960, he lived with Eve King while hidden in her house. And before that there was the thing with Roberta Weininger — beautiful Roberta, she’s been under house arrest for some time, now. These love affairs caused me pain, and in its context I had one or two affairs of my own. I suppose I thought of redressing the balance — some such expedient. But this again was the use of measures designed for a situation that had very little bearing on the realities of ours. If I’d only known, it didn’t matter how many women Max had, it didn’t make any difference. Whether or not he could really love a woman, me or any other woman, was not what was vital to him.

Spears went underground, too, but other members of ‘Umanyano Ngamandla’ were detained and when they came out of prison the movement broke up; most of them, including Spears, rejoined the ANC, then banned and become an underground movement. The notes for the methodology of African socialism had been safe from the security raids on our outhouse cottage because I had bundled the papers into a laundry bag and kept it hidden in the laboratory, all the time. When Spears came to see me one day I told him they were intact; he smiled, the days of the work on the methodology belonged to another time. Decades, eras, centuries — they don’t have much meaning, now, when the imposition of an emergency law or the fall of a bomb changes life more profoundly in a day than one might reasonably expect to experience in a lifetime. Spears wasn’t drinking. He didn’t come often any more, and neither did William Xaba, another friend who always used to be in and out of the cottage. There was a move among politically active Africans to keep out of white houses, no matter whose they were, and to reject friendship and even intimacy with whites as part of white privilege. Max was in Cape Town then, for three months that stretched to six, working on a new radical journal whose editors were replaced as quickly as they were banned. Bobo and I went down for two weeks at Christmas and every day the three of us walked along the cliff road above the sea, where the polyps of seaweed reach up from far down in the water. ‘Look there. Look there,’ we urged Bobo, but his little boy’s gaze would follow your finger as its object, and see no further than the end of it. I wonder if it was the papers of the African socialist methodology that Max took down with him in the suitcase.

Between heliograph flashes of sun on water, undeciphered, there are still things that were said. ‘Christ, when you see how African women will live! They know how to wait. And to keep themselves and their children together. There’s everything that matters to learn from them.’ Yes, he was right; I was an amateur in loneliness, in stoicism, in trust. ‘Maybe if you’re ever going to achieve something, you’ll have to do it quite alone.’ I said that once, knowing that already he was scornful of the journal he was working on, and (looking down at seaweed in the water like flowers imprisoned in a glass paperweight) seeing the end of this like the end of anything else he had begun. He didn’t answer.

It was the last time we really lived together. He came back to Johannesburg and eventually we were divorced and he would disappear for months and turn up again. There was a rumour that he had slipped out of the country illegally and got in again. I didn’t know whom he spent his time with, though I had heard through our old Indian friend Solly that he had associated himself for a while with people who wanted to organize a new underground white revolutionary group.

Then the telephone rang at eleven o’clock at night and he said, ‘Liz? That you Liz? When the papers come out — d’you get the morning paper? There may be something big… Don’t forget.’

Nobody knows this. Nobody at all. I didn’t even tell the lawyers. I have never told Graham. It’s all that’s left of Max and me; all there is still between us. That voice, wild and quiet, over the telephone.

The water covers everything, soon no bubbles rise.

There were possibilities, but under what stone? Under what stone?

Max’s bomb, described in court as being made of a tin filled with a mixture of sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal, was found before it exploded and he was arrested within twenty-four hours. Others were more or less successful and it all began again, and worse than it had ever been before: raids, arrests, detention without trial. The white people who were kind to their pets and servants were shocked at bombs and bloodshed, just as they had been shocked, in 1960, when the police fired on the men, women and children outside the Sharpeville pass office. They can’t stand the sight of blood; and again gave, to those who have no vote, the humane advice that the decent way to bring about change is by constitutional means. The liberal-minded whites whose protests, petitions and outspokenness have achieved nothing remarked the inefficiency of the terrorists and the wasteful senselessness of their attempts. You cannot hope to unseat the great alabaster backside with a tin-pot bomb. Why risk your life? The madness of the brave is the wisdom of life . I didn’t understand, till then. Madness, God, yes, it was; but why should the brave ones among us be forced to be mad?