Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

“Look at your children,” Shibalo said at one point, pulling out a sheet of cardboard from under his chair. It was a sketch of active angles half-recognisable as legs and arms.

“ Very smart.” He must have been there the whole morning, then.

He took it without rancour. “I’ll come and do one for you one day. I’m pretty hot on drawing kids these days.”

“Like circus dwarfs,” said Ann, with the intimacy of a repeated bait.

Jessie was conscious of being drawn into their ambiance as a privilege which she had not consented to accept. Once she had been let in on them, they could not let her go without the temptation to make her party to themselves in some way; she was the outsider who stumbles upon the secret and is offered, as the price, the excitement of sharing it.

There is a magnetic field in the polarity of two people who are conducting a reckless love affair; the insolence, emotional anarchy, uncalculatedness have the gratuitous attraction of exploding fireworks even for those who regard the whole thing as a bit ridiculous. Something of the showy flare caught Jessie, and, in a mood that had risen to sharp banter and some laughter, she went off with the two of them to take up Shibalo’s old casual invitation, given at the Lucky Star that day, that she might come and see what his new work was like.

Ann was gay, in the car, and leant forward with her elbows on the back of the front seat so that she could chatter to the two in front. Gideon was driving. For the first time since she had come to live in the house, Ann treated Jessie as her equal: equal of the freedom of her youth, her lack of conditioning responsibilities, her unreflective responses that made her flat “I love that”, “I hate this” an edict.

“Stop at the corner, Gid.”

“What for?”

“That shop has nuts. I’m dying for some walnuts.”

She dashed out of the car and back again with the supreme and arrogant self-consciousness of someone who feels she may be mentioned in her absence. Jessie saw her go straight to the counter to be served before others who were there before her, taking no account of them. She paused at the car window, on Gideon’s side, before she got in again. “Have one”—her face was beseeching, a big smile with the corners of the lips tensely pressed down, her forehead flushed like one of the children’s before they began to cry.

The flat that they went to was like many of those in which Jessie had lived. She looked at the draughty entrance with its list of occupants, under glass, its trough of pale plants, its one maroon and two yellow walls, and gave a grudging smile. The urban education: if someone managed to get out of the townships it would be to a place like this.

“How d’you find it, working here?” she asked.

“It’s just like having my own place,” he said, giving her the freedom of it grandly. “Nobody’s there all day and I can do just what I like. I’ll meet you up top—” He took the back staircase instead of the lift because he had to take care not to attract the attention of the caretaker; she must not suspect that her tenants were allowing a black man to use their flat. When the two women got to the flat door, he was already there, inside. “Come right in, just step over the mess”—he kicked away a parcel from the dry cleaner’s and a cardboard honeycomb of empty bottles. He pulled open the curtains in the living-room, picked up some letters, put a noisy Greek record on the gramophone, talking all the time with the relaxed busyness of someone who has just come home. Ann ripped the paper bandage off a magazine that lay among the letters and began to look through it. The purpose of coming there seemed to be forgotten. Jessie, kept standing by the presence all round her of objects meaningful to the lives of people she had never met, began to wander curiously around the room, touching this, glancing at that. She put her hand out to turn canvases without asking permission, for she had been asked twice to come and look at them. The third one was upside down; she righted it. It was a nude, Ann, flung down alive on the canvas as if on a rug. She turned another and another. They were all Ann, only in several she was black.

Gideon Shibalo came up beside her, professionally. “It’s the subject that takes your breath away, ay?” He laughed. “It’s not my new technique.” He began to put up for her, one by one, without comment, charcoal drawings and oils of children, friezes and splashes of children, old with the life of the street.

Gideon Shibalo sometimes had the use of a car, and sometimes had not. There were various complex arrangements, from time to time, with friends or relations. When he said, “I’ve got my car round the corner”, it could mean his own old black Studebaker that he had sold to his brother-in-law two or three years ago, or a Citroën that he was only keeping on the road until he could find a buyer on behalf of the owner — a friend who had gone to Nigeria — or even the little shaky “second car” of some white friends who didn’t need it over a weekend. At one time he had had Callie Stow’s car practically permanently; a tiny beige Austin with a feather duster on the back window-ledge, and a yellow duster, street-map and snake-bite outfit in the glove box. When he did not have a car he went back to the bus queues and the trains at which the people hurled themselves in the echoing caverns of the city station or the open veld sidings of the townships, marked by a single light that was still burning at dawn.

The black car was sold when he was going to take up his scholarship, that time; his sister’s husband had given him a hundred pounds down and hadn’t paid off much more in the three years since then. The hundred pounds had gone towards the air ticket to Rome. He had got the whole fare back, of course, but he hadn’t kept it; some of it had gone into politics, but most went during the months when he hadn’t worked, and drank and gave it away. He was teaching now and he could have bought some sort of a car again, but he did not think of it; it did not irk him to depend upon the chance offers of others, in fact he took them all for granted in the manner of a man who is fobbed off with an abundance of things he does not want.

For the past two years — longer; since the scholarship — he had been made free of a section of the white world, and had lived as much there as among the people in whose midst he was born. He did not have the obvious freedoms of the street and public places, of course, but was a frequenter of those private worlds where the rules of the street, the pronouncements of public sentiment, are disembodied voices shouting out of a megaphone — here, between four walls, the rules are quite different, and the sentiments diverse. He had never sat in school beside white children, or in a bus among white men and women, or shared with them any of the other commonplaces of life; he simply found himself taken right into their most personal lives, where all decisions are upon personal responsibility, and even punishment is self-meted. The first time he slept in a white man’s house was after a party, in the studio of a white painter who had liked his work and wanted to get to know him; there was a noisy quarrel, sometime towards morning, between the man and his wife, and the wife had rushed into the room and dumped a sleeping baby boy out of the way on Shibalo’s couch.

During the months when he was trying to get a passport he saw a great deal of the liberal and political whites who took up his case and introduced him to the moral twilight zone of influence; from a people without power, he had not known that even among those who made and approved the laws that prevented a man like himself from going where he pleased, there were men who might have been able to help him, not out of a desire to do so, but in response to pressure on some tender spot in their own armour of power-survival. You touched the right secret place and the spring flew open somewhere else: it hadn’t worked, as it happened, for him, but there were others for whom it had.