Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Nguni was talking, in terms picked up from the liberation papers and news-sheets being printed all over the continent from Egypt to Cape Town, of “the weapon of withholding the people’s labour”.

They argued, as they had done since the failure of the last strike, to find out why it had failed. Everyone had a theory, something to fill the void of not knowing what to do next. Resolutions were approved to go from this, a special action committee, to the central committee of the national executive. Co-ordination, co-operation — all the big words flew about. People who had been lobbying watched those who had promised to back them up. The chap, Khoza, who thought slowly through a long discussion and then always came up with an objection just when the whole thing was threshed into agreement, began to talk. “I’d like to say one thing. We should put it to the national executive that we shouldn’t have a stay-at-home except in summer.”

Everyone ceased to listen the moment he opened his mouth. Someone gave a snorting laugh. Jackson Sijake, the lawyer, had professional attentiveness. “Yes? On what basis?”

“People need their pay more in winter. If a man loses a day’s money there’s no coal in the house, perhaps. It’s bad psychology.”

Thabeng flashed out at him, at everybody. “That’s something our people have got to learn. Man, you don’t get freedom from sitting over the fire, you can’t choose the weather the day you’re going to bring the country to a standstill.”

Gideon didn’t take Khoza seriously, but he put in, with his chuckle down in his chest, “I don’t think it’s a bad idea to plan a stay-at-home when it’s likely to be easier for us. Let’s think of everything , anything at all that will make the chances of success greater. But what we ought to do, man, is to concentrate on our organisation in small places. We must go all out to be active in the country, specially the Reef towns. It’s all too loose and patchy … complete stoppage here, everyone at work a few miles away. If you want to make a success you need months of preparation, getting people ready.”

“The most successful things have been things that have just come up — look at Kgosana’s march on Cape Town,” Nathan Xaba said. He had still the eyes of a countryman, intelligent, slow-blinking, as if he were looking into flames.

Sijake put his hand, with the thick linked watch-strap covering the wrist, palm down on his varnished chair-arm.

“That’s it. Enthusiasm, people get carried away, and then it’s gone. And what can happen to you as a result of a protest march? The leaders get arrested. Perhaps some of the crowd, too. But the rest go home, pleased with themselves. A strike calls for less excitement, more staying power, and your job at stake. That’s what we’ve got to concentrate on getting over to people.”

“You’ve forgotten that a march can end up with shooting,” Xaba said.

“Yes, with shooting. But when you’re dead you’re dead. You don’t have to think what’s going to happen to you next.”

Sijake was young and plump with a diaphragm that bulged his shirt-front over the belt of his trousers. He liked sports coats of hairy tweed, and his initials were embroidered, in tiny letters, unobtrusively, on his shirt-pocket. He had the authoritative manner that often goes with a smooth, square face. He had been, illegally, to Accra and to Cairo, and got back undetected. In prison he was the one who represented them all and prepared memoranda concerning their rights as prisoners, headed delegations to the governor, and primed them with answers for the Special Branch interrogations. He was constantly being arrested, between political imprisonments, for not having his identity or tax papers in order, for fast driving, and for breaking the banning order against his attendance at gatherings or travelling outside the area to which he was confined. He defended himself and was acquitted on one legal technicality or another, time and again. He and Gideon had done a lot of jobs together. With complicated arrangements that sometimes involved changes of borrowed cars from town to town they drove over the borders into Swaziland or Basutoland to visit people who were in exile since the last State of Emergency. Gideon was not under a territorial ban at present; Sijake said to him that night after the meeting, “You’ll be around in July, I hope?” He was referring to the school holidays.

The woman whose husband’s house they were in entered, looked at them as if she expected them to be gone, ignored their greeting and went out again. She was dressed in her day-clothes but her head was tied up for the night in a doek.

“Sure.”

“I think it would be a good thing if you went all over the Transvaal in that time — every dorp and little town. We’ll arrange contacts everywhere. Draw up a report on what they’re doing, how active branches, are and so on. Spend a few days wherever they need help with organising.” He added in English, “We’re lost in this rabbit burrow of underground, Boetie.”

Gideon had an impulse to give himself time by lying: “I don’t really know. I said something about doing some coaching. Indians whose kids are trying for matric.”

“We need someone to go, man, we need it.”

“I’ll let you know. I’ll find out what’s going on.”

There was a gleam on the bathroom floor that turned out to be a lipstick-case, and the dregs of red wine had dried sourly on glasses. “They must have had a party last night,” Ann said. “Were you there?”

“Looked in,” he said, without interest. “Their friends are not up to much.”

Although she liked the casualness with which he accepted the run of the flat, because that was just how she herself lived, there were times when he said something cold; a part of her held back for a moment from their presence together in the room and lagged shamefacedly towards some old loyalty. The two advertising men would have no idea that he dismissed them like that. The natural corollary to this thought — that he was living on them — did not come into it (she would have lived on anybody) but the hint that he exacted from them a price of their white privilege under the cover of friendship, set up a distant conditioned opposition.

She had introduced him to the idea of making his own frames for his paintings, because she thought the sort of thing the framers turned out imprisoned his work in something mass-produced and alien to it. Like Len before him, he was amused by the confident way she tackled obstacles: “How’re we going to make these corners right, they ought to be mortised or whatever it is.” “Ah, rubbish. That’s not necessary. There are all sorts of marvellous kinds of glue you can get. That stuff that little boys use — aeroplane glue. I’ll get it. The joins’ll be covered by the linen, anyway.”

They worked outside on the balcony, squatting on the floor, where the mess didn’t matter. He wore a blue and white Italian cotton shirt that she had bought him. She did not bother to paint her face and her grey eyes and thick eyebrows and lashes had the furry darkness of some creature surprised by daylight. They laughed and argued and got things wrong, lapsing into silences of fierce concentration. She broke finger-nails and every so often stopped to suck a finger that had got hurt. They tired and stopped to smoke, leaning against the balcony wall and hidden by it from everything but the living-room of the flat, and the sky. “I don’t see why you shouldn’t be ready for a small exhibition — say, even by July. Eben Swart’s gallery would be good. Or the small one at Howe’s.”

“Wouldn’t have more than twenty pictures — counting the old ones that everyone’s seen too often.”

None of the seven or eight oils and numerous sketches he had done of her could be used; they smiled at each other at the thought of this. “Perhaps in another town,” she said. “On another planet,” he said. They continued to talk lazily of the chances of putting a worthwhile show together, and then, without any change of tone, he said, “I may not be here in July. Most likely not. Something I’ve got to do for Congress.”