Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

He held Gideon in the special regard that people have for those who are free of their own ambitions; when he was with Gideon he felt that he himself was not entirely sold to and bound over by the goals set up for him and his kind. The fact that Gideon had slipped the moorings of his sister added to rather than detracted from this feeling of releaseful identification with Gideon, though Sandile had quite a strong family affection for her.

Gideon did not know when exactly Sandile had mentioned that he wanted to see him; he was very seldom in the township these days, and he merely happened to hear, from a casual encounter, that Sandile had been asking for him; at least two weeks went by before he remembered about it again, and called in at the shop. It was Saturday, and the place was crowded, and knee-deep in children; everything they had been sent to buy went up on to their heads: bags of mealie-meal, beer-bottles filled with milk. The thin little necks of the girls wobbled once as the burden was settled into place. “ Dumela ‘me .” Gideon pushed his way through gossiping women, and the fat ones smiled at him while the thin ones merely looked interrupted. Sandile was serving a sullen man in a leather cap with ear-flaps; the face was the thick, deadened face, greasy with drink-sweat, work-sweat, that you saw all over the townships. Sandile gave a little signal acknowledging Gideon, and when he was free for a moment called over, “You see how it is … come in.” He meant into the tiny store-room, a home-made lean-to strengthened like a fortress, at the back of the shop.

Sandile scattered the children — importuning him with their demands for “Penny Elvies” (sweets named for the American rock-and-roll singer) or “Penny atcha”, an Indian pickle — by an exclamation ending in a loud click of the tongue at the back of the throat. They swerved away like hens.

“The happy capitalist, the exploiter of the people,” said Sandile. “Christ, man, this goes on until seven tonight.”

“How’s business?”

“Ach, I want to knock out the wall, re-do the whole place, make it self-service; you know — little gate you turn round to go in, plastic basket to select what you want, little gate to go out. But you’d have to frisk them first, that’s the trouble. Turn them upside-down and shake them out. Specially the old ones with the big bozies; you’d be surprised what goes in in front there. Last week the wholesaler comes along with a lovely display card with razor blades. ‘Why don’t you put this up, it increases sales twenty-five per cent, we’ve proved it.’ —Our people are backward, man, everything’s got to be where they can’t even stretch for it.”

“Come out for a drink,” said Gideon, consolingly.

Sandile took a cigarette from him and sat down on a packing-case, leaving a broken-backed kitchen chair for him. “How the hell can I? The old man’s gone to fix up about his cousin’s funeral.”

“Where’s Bella?” Sandile’s wife was a district nurse, working for the municipal health department, but on Saturdays she was usually free to help in the shop.

“The baby kept her up all night. Have a cold drink?”

“Coffee, that’d be fine.”

Sandile looked put out for just a second, then called to the shop. A very black youth with an open mouth and eyes that reflected the lean-to like convex mirrors brought an open packet of coffee-and-chicory mixture with a brand-picture of a house in the form of a steaming coffee-pot. This house was clearer to Gideon than the memory of any of the rooms he had ever lived in; how many times as a child had he been sent to buy that packet with the coffee-pot house on it. Clara (his wife) had still used it, in the house in Orlando. Callie Stow ground her own beans, and at the flat there was always instant coffee of some special bitter kind; for years now he had been drinking the coffee that white people drank. The sight of the packet with the picture gave him the sensation of looking at an old photograph.

“Half Nyasa,” Sandile said, of the youth. He was pumping a primus. “At least that’s my explanation. Dumb as he’s black, that’s all I can tell you. Don’t you know somebody for me? They can’t even measure out a shilling sugar without spilling. You could start operations for the recovery of waste sugar on this damned floor.” He stopped pumping and pointed in exasperation to the cracks in the floor-boards where, it was true, there was a dirty glitter, like mica. Suddenly he grew ashamed of his preoccupation with what — switching to objectivity, as he could — he thought to be the petty matters of shop-keeping.

“So they’re thinking seriously about taking up this rent campaign?” he said. “Bella’s got an old aunt and she’s fallen months behind and been given eviction papers, and — yesterday it was — someone came from Congress and had a talk with her.”

They talked politics for a while. The water boiled and Sandile made coffee. “As a matter of fact, I was hoping you’d come in sometime,” he said, spooning sugar into Gideon’s cup.

“Hi, hi—” Gideon restrained him.

“All right, I’ll take it.” He poured another cup and Gideon sugared it for himself. “I’ve been asking for you, but you haven’t been around. Nobody’s seen you.”

“No, I know, I bumped into K. D. and he told me.” Sandile often had small plans or deals that involved Gideon — he had got Gideon’s record player cheaply for him, through one of the wholesalers, and he and Gideon borrowed odd sums of money from each other from time to time. This was the sort of thing they saw each other about. While Gideon put the cup of coffee to his mouth, Sandile said, “Clara was here. She was up here last week and she was talking to me a long time, and, well, she wants to come back to Jo’burg. It seems so, yes.” He was watching Gideon, embarrassed, yet alertly anxious, as if he hoped to disclaim responsibility for what he might have said.

Gideon had just filled his mouth with the warm liquid and for the moment the impact of its taste, flooding his body, produced by far the stronger reaction. What is the word for nostalgia without the sentiment and the pleasure nostalgia implies? The flavour set in motion exactly that old level of consciousness where, in the house of the old aunt with whom he had been farmed out as a schoolboy, matriculation was drawn like the line of the horizon round the ball of existence; where, later, in the two neat rooms in Orlando, he had paid off a kitchen dresser and drawn “native studies” on cheap scarves for a city curio shop. Threshing, sinking, sickening — the sensation produced by the taste became comprehension of what Sandile was saying. He put down the cup. “What about her job?”

Sandile shrugged and slowly took the plastic spoon out of the sugar; the damp brown stuff moved like a live mass.

“I don’t see the sense,” said Gideon, with the face of a man discussing the fate of a stranger.

“Well, she wants to come.”

“To you?” Gideon said.

Sandile looked at him.

“It’s not possible. Anything else is not possible. It’s absolutely out, that I can tell you.”

Sandile did not answer. Gideon wanted to get him to speak because he could not bear to have the matter, even in the abstract of words, thrust upon himself.

“Bella knows that little girl — from the hospital, of course. She thought it was more or less off with you two, lately. She’s seen her with another chap, and so on.” Sandile took a deep breath and stopped.

Gideon felt himself drawing further away every second; the cosy store-room with its high barred window, the deal table and the primus, the smell of paraffin and strong soap, the familiar face of Sandile and the taste of the coffee — a hundred doors were closing in him against these things.