Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

For Ann, all that was necessary would have been over, now; but Gideon hung on in some sort of perversity or fascination, and then it was dinner, and of course he stayed. As the room upstairs had been, another cell of the house was roused to the hum of company. Tom and Jessie not only seemed determined to take Gideon as just another guest who had dropped in — they appeared actually to regard him as one. He and Boaz were at the centre of the talk, all through dinner. Ann knew that Boaz was impressed with him; with Gideon and Boaz both at the table with her, she was expansively charming to everyone.

“Is it a fossil you’re preserving, or is it something living, that’s what I’m asking,” Gideon said, of Boaz’s studies in music.

“Both,” said Boaz, with a look that suggested this must be self-evident for two people like themselves. “The instruments will disappear altogether very soon. But the impulse to make music won’t die.”

“But can the drums and flutes and xylophones provide a tradition for chaps who’re now going to be playing the piano and the trumpet muffled with a tin pot — all right, then, say even the violin or the organ. You come to Schoenberg via Bach and those boys; can an African arrive at the same point straight from the talking drums and the rain-making dance played on an ox-horn covered with python skin and strung with monkey-guts?”

Jessie and Tom and Ann laughed, but Boaz was excited: “Now you’re getting to it. Once an African acquires all that the white civilisations have learnt about music, can he make use of a tradition that had not reached the same culmination, and perhaps was reaching in another direction?”

As usual, Gideon moved the food about his plate without eating it. He leaned back against his chair with a cigarette burning down in his hand and said, “The whites took away the African past; once we accepted the present from them, that was that.”

“The past is accomplished, living in your bones, you can’t lose it,” Tom said.

“No, you must lose it. When we accepted the white man’s present, of industrialisation and mechanised living, we took on his future at the same time — I mean, we began to go wherever it is he’s going. And our past has no continuation with this. So it is lost. For all practical purposes it is lost. I don’t know if perhaps a musician or a writer or somebody might be able to make use of it still. And, of course, though you can sign on for somebody else’s future, you can’t share their past; that’s why we haven’t got one.” He seemed to be showing off a little now, but merely to divert. He looked down over the slope of his slouched body like a man who exhibits a stump where an arm or leg should be. “That’s what’s wrong with us.”

Jessie was suddenly listening, as if she had been absent from the company and had returned, but before she could speak, Tom said “Peoples have survived a break with tradition before,” and Boaz said “What if the break had come from within?”

“It always comes from there! Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?” Jessie called to Gideon. But he seemed to move a step out of their claims on him every time; he murmured, “Christ came from inside. Yes. I suppose you could say that. I don’t know whether something like that would have happened to us. If we hadn’t signed up.”

He had never talked with Ann as he was talking that evening. Her impression of his presence came, not direct from himself, but as made by him upon the others. The least self-esteem demanded was a jealous, immediate assumption of the new valuation of him she saw in them. She was goaded to possessive pride in an aspect of the man, and therefore her association with him, she had been innocent of; she could not admit that while they found these things at once she had missed or ignored them.

She began to see something that it might be “all about”.

When she sat beside him in the car, now, she was aware of her distinction from the white faces passing in the street. They merged into a white blur, down there. Gideon became a black man to her; the black man that everyone pushed away, and that she, she, put her hand out and touched.

The willows out in the veld where Ann and Gideon had picnicked a few weeks before were yellowing, but the garden was still dark and heavy. The tide of green had risen and risen with each rain; new growth overlapped old, the grass stood thick and soft. All around and overhead the leaves, layer on layer, shadow on shadow, swag on swag and tier on tier, were holed and lacy with the feasting of insects. Jessie sat reading, in the afternoons, among the remains of the banquet.

Recently she had begun reading again as she had done when she was seventeen or eighteen and it was possible for a particular book to influence her as the mind of no person she knew in the flesh could. The opening of a window or the snatch of some weird music from the house behind her kept her reminded, on the surface, where awareness of environment is automatically recorded, like a message taken in one’s absence, that Boaz was usually at home when she was. She felt not curiosity, but a shrinking away from what might be going on in him; she wanted to be left alone to no demands but her own. This adventure of Boaz’s wife would work itself out between them like so many others; since she (Jessie) was fond of him, she was slightly ashamed to find how now, once he knew, she felt herself disengaged from friendly involvement. She had been mixed up so many times with friends whose marriages or love affairs went awry because of another man or woman; the situation between Boaz and Ann was the same as the others — except that Gideon Shibalo was black, of course. That was the only difference. It was a difference that she assumed had very little significance for people like themselves — the Stilwells and Davises. It did mean that there was some element of calculable danger in the whole business for Ann, she supposed — making love to Shibalo was breaking the law — as against the incalculable dangers of pain and disruption present in every love affair.

But Boaz came down sometimes for a breath of air and his casual yet intimate presence, stretched on the grass beside her, or leaning forward in one of the old deck-chairs he had dragged up, brought them to the point when naturalness made it necessary to talk about Ann. Jessie did not ask him what was happening, but felt obliged, out of the only politeness she cared for, to acknowledge the subject of his silences. They were talking of Fuecht’s house at the sea; Jessie said, with the open-eyed assertion that was directed against Tom’s unexplained resistance to the place, “We can’t afford to turn up our noses at a free holiday. As I remember it, it was miles up the beach, which is nice. But it may be more built-up along there now, I don’t know; my stepfather had it let permanently for years, we were never offered it.”

“You want to go next month, you said?”

“If Tom definitely makes up his mind he won’t go in July. Are you going to Moçambique?”

He said, in an ordinary voice, frowning at her, “I don’t know what to do about it.”

“Is she not going to go with you?”

They looked at each other. “I haven’t asked her.” He added: “It may sound mad.”

“Oh no.”

“I don’t want to force her to decide. — Anything.”

“Yes?” Jessie spoke with her hand over her mouth.

“I’ve got to wait to see how she feels. I’d expect her to do the same for me, as long as she was interested enough. — I am,” he added.

“Well, that’s fine. It makes me sick when everybody’s playing. People show off so much in love affairs. You know, Boaz, I sometimes get afraid that everything we think of as love — even sex — is nearly always power instead. You know what I mean? Most of the time people don’t really want each other, they only want not to let go.”