Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Ida was in the room; he heard her gentle, breathy voice with the sound of agreement in it as he put his foot on the thick doorstep. Some shirts and socks were lying on the bed; she had a key and must have brought his washing. Sol was there too, a friend who drove a dry cleaner’s van. He challenged, with pleasure: “You’re not easy to get hold of, man! I’ve been here twice, everything locked up. I met the old man and he said he hadn’t seen you for two days.”

“Yeh, I know.” Shibalo grinned. He was looking round the room with the roving interest of one who wants to keep up with whatever life has been going on in his absence. “Did Bob do anything about the record player?” he said to the young woman.

“Well, I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him. He might have tried to get hold of you.”

“Night duty?” he asked her.

She shook her head and moved her feet so that she could admire her patent shoes. “Day off.”

“Where’re you people going to eat?” Sol asked.

“I’ve eaten at my sister’s already,” the girl said.

“Well, what about it, then?” Sol gestured as if to set her about preparing a meal. She laughed, “I don’t think there’s anything.”

The room had the disturbed look of a place that is subjected to quiet neglect alternating with vigorous raids on its resources. A suitcase stuffed with papers had burst a lock on one side, there were paper-backs embossed with candle-drippings beside the bed, four or five different tobacco tins, some bottles of pills and a broken chain that had once been on the door. Sol sat in a smart yellow canvas chair shaped like a sling; it was of the kind advertised for “modern leisure living”. The black iron bed, book-shelf sagging under canvases as well as books, the cupboard where the girl Ida unearthed a tin of pilchards — each held objects that had been turned up in the rummage for something else, and never found their way back where they belonged. The window was overgrown with a briar of strips of wire and tin provided as burglar-proofing by the landlord, and as it gave no light or air anyway was covered with a strange little wool carpet. A primus, a basin of pots and dishes, and a big old typewriter, filled up the space between the legs of a table; there was a clean square on the top where the record player usually rested. The back of the door was covered with a huge travel poster reproducing a Romanesque madonna, and magazine cut-outs of Klee, Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Sidney Nolan and the Ife bronzes curled away from the walls. When they fell in an autumn of their own they were replaced by others, but the cutting of a photograph that had appeared in a newspaper when the Italian scholarship award was announced was stuck back again, and was already yellowed and brittle.

Ida went to the corner shop to get bread and polony and Shibalo took out the brandy bottle. Sol was talking politics — it was about some point that was going to come up for discussion at a meeting that he had wanted to canvass Shibalo — and looking over Shibalo’s newspaper at the same time. “There you are”—he chopped the side of his hand against a column. “There you are”—he took the glass of brandy and began again—“they want a conference. ‘Liberals and Progressives urge consultation with all races.’ There it is. What do we want to talk about, for Christ’s sake? Jabavu talked to them, Luthuli talked to them, talk, talk, what do we want to talk for when we’ve got the whole continent behind us?”

“A long way off,” Shibalo suggested. “Rhodesia, Portuguese East in between—” Sol stared at him to indicate that he knew better, whatever he might be saying: “Going, going, man.”

“You think Nkrumah’s going to sail round to Cape Town and land troops?”

“ No , man. I didn’t say that. You know what I think. I think the guns are going to come in through Bechuanaland and Basutoland and the U.N.’s going to take over in South West.” He stopped at the obstacle of his own impatience because these things had not happened already.

“And the guns are going to come in from Southern Rhodesia and the Portuguese to blow those guns out.”

“So what do you want? You think we’ll have a nice talk to the whites and they’ll push the Government out and hand over to us?”

“Look — even when you’re being smart, you don’t get it straight. Most of the whites don’t want to talk to you, they wouldn’t be ready to talk to you until you’ve opened their brains with a panga. Make no mistake about it, they won’t waste any words on the blacks. They don’t want any palaver with black leaders because there are no black leaders so far as they are concerned, understand? They are the ones who decide what’s going to happen to us. Where we’re going to live. Where we’re going to work. What bloody stairs we’ll put our stinking black feet on — talk! My God, it’s only a miserable handful without a place up there in the Government between them, who want to talk . The others want to shoot it out, man, once they can’t wangle it out any longer with shit about homelands. But when it comes to shooting it out, stop dreaming, that’s what I’m telling you chaps. We may need sticks and stones and whatever we can lay our hands on, as well as the promises from our brothers out there.”

Sol, who spent his nights in such talk, could not lean forward in confirmation of points as he wished to, because the yellow chair was one that held its occupant rigidly back in repose, and tipped him out if he tried to make it more accommodating. But his face broadened in the relief of agreement, now and then, and now his lips lifted away from his big, uneven teeth and his mouth opened in a gesture of receptiveness, warm, encouraging. He and Shibalo held one another’s eyes for a few moments, drank the brandy, and felt the comfort and reassurance of an old complementary friendship. When Ida came back with the food they were loud in talk again.

“I don’t want blood! I don’t like blood!”

“… no, be honest, man — what’s the real reason? Why have you stayed with Congress, why have I stayed? No, it’s not because of non-violence—”

“I don’t want blood! I don’t like blood!” Sol got carefully out of his chair and took another brandy; this was one of the interjections he always murmured.

“We want guns, like everyone else. We’re prepared to fight with guns. We’re waiting here for guns, like manna from heaven. We’ve got round to feeling we can’t do anything without guns, isn’t that so? The only difference is that Congress doesn’t say this out loud, and the Africanists do.”

“Wait a moment, wait a sec … we don’t want to have to use guns, that’s the difference, but they don’t see any other way—”

“But we don’t see any other way, either, do we? Isn’t that exactly what we’ve been talking about all this time? We’re a banned organisation, man — you can get arrested tomorrow if you hold up your pants with a Congress badge.”

The young woman cut the bread and the meat. She did not take part in the talk, except to laugh occasionally, but she listened with the air of one who hears her own views expressed, and when she was in other company she always repeated what Shibalo said. She was a nurse, which, along with school-teaching and social welfare work, had been the ambition of most African girls with intelligence and drive above the average until a few years ago; now such girls wanted to be models or actresses. Influenced by them, she dressed in the latest fashion to filter down to mass-production, but had not straightened her hair and wore it grown long into a high bun on top of her head. There was no indication in her face of how old she might be; it was simply a statement of adult womanhood, that would last fresh and firm for a comfortable time. Shibalo had paid a lot of attention to her at a party one night, and then people had begun to ask them to parties together, as a couple. He was always affectionate with her at parties; there was something about her that fitted in with a light mood, that demanded that one should tease her about her gilt choker necklace and put one’s head on her shoulder after too many drinks. She knew that this display was misleading; they were not really a couple, that she could tell, though she had lived with him on and off for a year, and she did the things — like taking his washing away for him — that a casual bed-companion does not do, but that a woman does for her man.