Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Every contact with whites was touched with intimacy; for even the most casual belonged by definition to the conspiracy against keeping apart. It was always easier to be drunk than sober, to exchange a confession than have a chat; even, he found, with amusement rather than surprise, to have a love affair than a friendship. He had found easy and mutual attraction between himself and several of the women. The affairs were short-lived, and, like dreams, never emerged into the light of day. This was not to say that they were nothing but sexual encounters — these were always far more than that, for even the most ordinary of sexual encounters was also the reaching out of two mysteries — but that they carried over nothing into the world of streets and public places. Nothing, nothing; if the two met in the street next day it was as if they had not met.

Callie Stow was something else again. The very first time he remembered seeing her face was in the confusion of that stage at a party when faces, furniture, objects began to present shifting levels for which his eyes could not make a sufficiently quick change of focus. As if he were on a trampoline, people now rose, now fell before him. He had seen her quite often before, but it was only when she became part of the onset of nightmare that he remembered her. She was a Scotswoman with a Scandinavian mother, and in her soft voice with a slight Glasgow accent she was talking to him as if he were perfectly sober. She told him that he had made a discovery, that was all, a discovery that would have had to come to him sometime, anyway. “There’s no time to go after what you want for yourself, you’ve got to be one of the crowd if you want your life to have any meaning to you,” she said. She had short, very clean hair that might have been blonde or already white, and the fine fair skin that those sort of Englishwomen have (he never did understand that Scots and English were not the same thing). She could have been any age; his grandmother, for all he knew; an Englishwoman with a skin like that, and blue eyes and no lipstick, might turn out to be anywhere between twenty-five and fifty. (Some sort of flowered dress, and a string of small pearls.) He thought about the matter-of-fact way she had spoken of the wall that reared up before him, although he was hazy about what she had said. When he met her again in someone else’s house less than a week later, he at once asked, “What was it about finding something out?”

She said precisely, “I said that you’d have had to discover sometime that you can’t do anything for yourself, and perhaps now was the time — that’s all.”

He gave his chuckle, and said sourly, “Thank you very much, but I don’t feel particularly philosophical about not being able to do anything for myself. Whether it’s the time or not.”

“No one would suggest you should,” she said. “It just seems to me that now you’ve had clearly shown to you that the only thing that means anything if you’re an African is politics. You’ve made the only choice. You don’t need philosophy; you’ve got necessity.”

“You’re not a painter,” he said.

“No, I am not a painter—” the tone of her voice granted a demand she respected but could not share. “What’s the good of saying that it’s terrible that you can’t be one? There it is. You’ve got politics, that’s all. Why drink yourself silly, mooning over the other? You’re a man of your time. Different times, there are different things to be done, some things are possible, some are not. You’re an African, aren’t you?”

He laughed but she pressed her chin back firmly: “Having a black skin doesn’t automatically mean that, you know.”

As he got to know this woman he made another discovery — one that she would not have been aware of, since she had no more self-consciousness than vanity. Although she shared a kind of life that was familiar to him, some outward identity of outlook as manifested in their being present together in the same room, smiling at the same remarks, at a party, for example, or sitting at the same conference table (as they were later to do) on a political action committee — this outward identity of outlook gave no indication of her control and direction by forces of whose possible existence he was not even aware. He had never known anyone before who was a rationalist by conviction and education. He was aware, dimly, that his actions were moved by the huge wheels of the need to create, to be free, and, clearly, the small wheels of wanting and taking. But for her nothing was empirical, no instinct was without sound objective backing, no action ran wild and counter to herself. All was codified, long ago, beginning when, as a child, she had listened to discussions between her free-thinking, Victorian socialist grandfather and her missionary father. As children are said to select automatically the foods that their bodies require, she rejected the faith of her father for the tenets of her grandfather, and went on to university to read political philosophy. Then she had studied labour organisation in England, and economics in Sweden. She was one of those who take an actual hand in rigging up the framework of civilisation; she had worked in refugee camps in Europe after the war, and in North Africa later, and had run an adult education scheme among African farm workers in Rhodesia. In South Africa she had written surveys of indentured and migratory labour for a world organisation, and was a standard figure among the organisers of various campaigns for civil rights that came into existence time and again, sometimes comparatively flourished and sometimes did not, and at last were banned, anyway. She had taken out South African papers at the beginning of the Fifties and so could not be deported; but she had had, of course, a spell in prison during one of the States of Emergency declared in times of African unrest.

There were books in her house on butterflies and architecture, cave paintings and birds, as well as the sociology and history and politics you would expect. It seemed to Shibalo that she had books on everything; for her it was not that the birds were simply there, flying around, mushrooms came up in the veld after rain. She possessed the world twice over; once as a natural phenomenon, a second time as a filing cabinet in which all creation existed again in the form of a name and description, all concurrent, all within the compass of one man’s experience. He was aware of this second possession as some kind of power over life; one he didn’t have, though he’d got his B.A. at Fort Hare, years ago.

Callie Stow darned his socks and thought nothing of waiting for him on a public street corner; but who would have dreamed that this woman with her tweed skirt and sensible shoes, and her calm white head (he thought of it, all his life, as “the professor’s head”), was getting into the small beige Austin driven by her lover? He was not unattracted by her, either; it was again a first time, the first time he had desired a woman mentally, been drawn to her through the processes of her thinking. In the end, the very thing that had made the open relationship possible killed it off, for him. He did not feel like her lover; she came out of prison and he came from “underground” where he had been lying low for a while, and she said, “Hullo my dear, it’s good to see you,” with the “ui” sound in “good” that he remembered so well. It was all right to say it, but he suddenly felt cheated and disappointed beyond words. He did not know what he wanted; he had not known it was not this. He moved away from her, taking with him a certain discipline of mind, an ability to get at arm’s length from himself, that he had got from her but that he could make use of only intermittently, since it was acquired and not inherent; it continued to be most easily at his command only when he found himself in her company or in the set within a set in which he had moved with her. In time he began to see it as an act that he could do to show how easy it was, really, to belong with them.