Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Ann pretended to lift up the cloth: “And he’s got knobbly toes, into the bargain!”

“Shaka’s warriors certainly wore sandals,” said Tom. “I don’t know about any others — Boaz? What d’you say?”

Gideon’s voice, once he had begun to speak, went on through interruptions without emphasis and with an indifference to whether it was lost or not. “People must have something, something not hard, that anyone can do. It may be meaningless (“Not meaningless, this,” Boaz said) but that doesn’t matter much. Take off your shoes. You don’t have to be able to understand what goes on at a meeting. You don’t have to read about it. You don’t have to pay two and six membership. Useless, harmless, but you feel you’re doing something.”

“It’s not harmless,” Boaz said across the voice.

“Take off your shoes. People can afford it. You don’t ask too much of them. You hold them together.”

“Whenever you talk about people — the people — I have the feeling I don’t know who you’re talking about,” Len said to Gideon. “You don’t mean yourself, do you?”

“Can’t ask them all the time to trust you, trust you. Let them have something they can do by themselves. Even if it’s meaningless and harmless.”

“No, you never mean yourself.”

Boaz leaned out across the table like the figure-head of a ship, his clear-cut lips shining wet from the gulp of wine he had just taken. “Not harmless. You know that. You know quite well what it is.”

“Take off your shoes.” The voice said it to himself, for the sound of it.

“Oh yes, not harmless at all. Exactly the same meaning as burning down a church or a school or a clinic or a cinema.”

“Take off your shoes.” Gideon smiled at no one in particular, then gave his little chuckle, and fixed his consciousness of the room on Boaz, like a drunk choosing a point of focus. He said, suddenly, “An act of pure rejection.”

“Exactly.”

His cigarette was burning down in the crumbled bread on his plate and he picked it up, saw that it was almost dead, and brought himself back to the company with an effort. “Beautiful, stripped, pure—” The words were unsheathed, one by one, like a man giving up knives.

“A pure rejection.”

The phrase held for a second; and then all the talk round the table piled upon it and buried it. “Not harmless to the people who do it, I mean; I’m not talking of the act itself—” “An anomalous glorification of the past, qua past …” “Damned silly to identify …” “More than that, dangerous, you can’t substitute magic for political power …” “… step out of his shoes and out of his power, I suppose.” Everyone said what he always said, in one form or another, in every context, seizing automatically on what there was in the subject for them. For Tom it was institutions — the difficulty, for new, intensely nationalistic black states, of finding institutions of law, commerce, education other than those associated with former subservience. For Jessie it was the notion that people could externalise an influence by making some common object of use symbolic of it, and then getting rid of the object. Ann argued with Len about what the others were saying, and Boaz and Gideon tried to analyse how far it was possible for a political movement to rule with and not become ruled by the release of irrational instincts. “Of course it’s dangerous, but what can we do in Africa? — colonialism was dangerous for the whites, it couldn’t last without a pay-off coming sixty years or so later, but what could they do? We can’t look much further than getting what we want—” No one had noticed that the old man, Tom’s father, sitting at table, had become congealed in expression and posture as if, while all around him was noise, agitation and mobility, he would never move again. Tom took him quietly out of the room and murmured to Jessie as he came back and swung a leg over his chair to sit again, “Just one gin too many, I think — he’s lying down.”

Len caught the domestic aside. “Passed out? Hell, he’s a nice old man.”

When Gideon had gone home (in Ann’s car) and everyone was on the way to bed, Boaz came down again to the living-room, where Tom was making notes for a lecture he was supposed to give at a discussion club the next week. They sloshed brandy into two glasses that already had been used and began, at first deliberately, then carried away by real interest, a long discussion about a book on Chinese navigation pre-dating the Portuguese exploration of Africa. Jessie banged with a shoe on the floor overhead; they laughed, so loudly that she banged again. With the drop of their voices, the talk lost momentum. Boaz yawned until he looked quite groggy; he wandered about the room and paused, and wandered again. His face shone waxy and his eyes were hidden like a clown’s in the diamond-shaped darkness made by the recess of shadow under each eyebrow and the triangle of plum-coloured skin cutting down the line of cheekbone from beneath.

“One thing I can’t stand,” he said, “the way he repeats a phrase or a sentence as if he gets some meaning out of it no one else does. That sort of withdrawal … You know what I mean — he makes you wait for him to return before you can go on with what you’re trying to say.” The moment he allowed himself to speak of Gideon, the brandy he had been drinking without apparent effect took hold of him like an arm hooked roughly round his neck. “If you knew the insane things that’ve been going on … the whole of tonight … ‘black bastard’ … Over and over again, to myself, while I was talking … like a maniac? ‘Black bastard’. All that filthy cock, man.”

He stretched himself on the sofa, and when Tom finished his work he saw that he was asleep. His head was flung back on a raised arm behind his head. The fingers of the hand moved like tendrils in an effort against cramp that did not break through to consciousness; on the blank face of sleep traces of bewilderment and disgust were not quite erased round the mouth. Tom looked at him for a moment with the curiosity that is always aroused by the opportunity to contemplate suffering without having to respond to the sufferer, and then decided to leave him there, and turned out the light.

Gideon Shibalo got a message one day to go and see Sandile Makhawula at his shop. Sandile was his brother-in-law and they had remained friendly through Gideon’s long drift apart from his wife; in fact, all that was left of an old feeling and an old way of life was the uncomplicated ease Gideon felt on those occasional evenings when he remembered Sandile and dropped in on him. Sandile was light-skinned, rather an ugly yellow-brown, with narrow, tight-skinned eyes that added to his slightly Chinese look. He shaved his forearms and, resting on the counter in rolled-up shirt-sleeves, their smoothness, through which the roots of hairs showed dark like faults under tinted glass, betrayed a secret vanity. It was the sort of thing one could not guess at, so little did it match the rest of his character. The shop belonged to the father of the woman he had married; it had always sold sugar and mealie-meal and the cheaper brands of tinned food, as well as sweets and cigarettes and cold drinks — he had branched out into a radio repair business on the side. “Look at it,” he would say, indicating the old-fashioned wooden counter, worn away on top like a butcher’s block, the one small glass showcase filled with biscuits, cigarettes, cards of watch-straps, cotton reels and dead flies, and the valves and wires of dismantled radio sets lying among spiked slips of paper and tins of snuff. “I’m trying to make a go of it …” He made fun of his own ambitions to run the place like a shop in town, yet he went on doggedly, persuading the old man to get a modern cash register one year, taking another year to get him to allow the fly-embossed Zam-buk advertisements to be taken down and replaced with three dimensional displays showing hair-straighteners and deodorants. He would have a house in Dube one day — like all the other well-off shopkeepers, Gideon used to tease him. “Well, maybe; what else is there for me?”