Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Gideon thought about James Mapulane’s face, but he did not think about the border. He had not thought about the border since the time when he was supposed to be going to Italy, and had thought about it all the time, the form constantly changing like a cloud taking shape from what is in one’s mind — now the actual veld and stones and baobabs, the wide brown river of this border near Mapulane’s, now the sands and the kraals hedged with euphorbia that led to the one in Bechuanaland, now simply the outline and end of something, an horizon over which he was a still smaller dot within the diminishing dot of a silver aeroplane.

They slept in the car on the way to Basutoland. It was a small car and even the back seat, which Ann had, was very cramped. In the morning they were dazed and stiff-necked and she said, “We’re going to buy a tent.” He had slept in all sorts of places but never in a tent; that belonged again to that world of pleasure jaunts and leisure that black children did not have.

“Oh look …” A stretch of tall yellow grass, where the sakabula birds flew, trailing their long tails, was passing her window. “A house there — imagine a house in the middle of that …” She had never had a house of her own, but all over the world she saw places where a house might be, and to which she would never go back.

“I like a place with trees. Right in the middle of trees. You know, one of those houses where the light is striped, all day long.”

The sluggishness of the cold and stuffy night in the car lifted as they drove, and their responses, that had coiled away back to themselves in separateness, began to warm and open.

“But grass all round, as high as your head, as far as you can see … Let’s go down there a bit?”

“What for?”

“Oh what for, what for.”

Ann strolled over the whole earth as if it belonged to her, for she did not question, which amounted to the same thing, that there was nowhere where she wasn’t wanted. He brought a blanket out of the car and when they had walked a little way they sat hidden in the grass, leaning comfortably back to back, eating bananas and smoking, coming back to life.

He said, “What time is it?”

“Are you hungry?”—because this was his usual way of suggesting they ought to get a meal. She leaned over and broke off another banana, offering it to him. But he wanted somehow to attach this space of existence, which he and the woman both contained and were contained by indivisibly, to what he had all the rest of his life — to that constant bearing away upon actions and desires. He was not hungry — not in any way at all. He wanted nothing, and had in himself everything. He did not need to touch her, even without touching her he possessed her more completely than any woman he had ever had. She lay back and closed her eyes. He watched her a little while as she slept, the pulse in her neck the only moving thing in the silence about him, and then he got up and went in search of a reedy place that he had noticed, not far off, from the car; if there was water there, he wanted to wash. He smiled at the thought of the sight of himself, walking through the veld with her cake of perfumed soap and a nylon toothbrush.

Ann opened her eyes on one of the beautiful, untidy birds, swaying almost within reach of her hand on a thick dead stalk of the grass that was high as a wall round the nest the blanket had broken into it. She sat up with a cat-yawn. Her body was with lack of it. The strands of the bird’s long tail tangled in panic with the grasses as it took off. She stood up to watch it and saw a man standing a few yards away.

“Hullo,” she said. “Did I startle you?”

“You all right, lady?” He had the slow sober speech of the country Afrikaner speaking English, but his voice was the voice of a man of substance, sensible and sure of himself. He did not come closer but watched her smiling her big smile at him, tucking her shirt into her skirt, a beautiful girl with the long brown legs he associated with the city. There was that immediate pause, filled with the balance of sleep, where before it had been hollow quarter taken and given, between an attractive woman of class and a man old enough and just worldly enough to recognise it. He was a farmer, in a good grey suit, thick shoes and the inevitable felt hat that country Afrikaners wear — on his way to the lawyer or the bank, most probably.

“I’ve just had a lovely snooze, that’s all. You don’t mind, do you?”

He softened into a more personal manner. “It’s not my land, it’s my neighbour’s, see? But I just thought you was in trouble. The car there, and so on.”

“Thank you very much.”

“You’re not on your own here? There’s a lot of drunk boys around on Sunday—”

She snatched the conversation: “No, no, my husband’s here, just gone over the—”

“Oh well, that’s O.K. then, sorry to disturb you—” He was eager to be affable now, specially friendly in that indiscriminate comradeship that white people feel when they meet in the open spaces of a country where they are outnumbered. Her own voice had tipped over in her some vessel filled with fear that she didn’t know was there; it poured into her blood while she smiled at him, brilliantly, smiled at him to go, and was afraid to look anywhere but at him in case she should see Gideon standing there too. Just as the man left and she heard a car start up away on the road, there was the figure, the hieroglyph in the distance that she could read as the quiet, slouching walk, the narrow khaki trousers, the blue shirt that was her present.

The car must have been gone five minutes by the time he came up. As he grew nearer a run of trembling went through her several times; she had the dread of something approaching that couldn’t be stopped. She wanted to run back to the little car. When he stood there, paused as he came through the grass to their little clearing, and looked round it as one does round a room where one senses immediately something has happened in one’s absence, she laughed excitedly, braggingly, and half-whispered, half-wept, “A man was here! A farmer! I’ve had a visitor!”

He looked at her, looked all round him.

Then, “You’re sure he’s gone?”

“Oh he’s gone, yes he’s gone, I heard the car, he’s gone.” She was rocking herself with him, digging her fingers into his arms. He had never seen her so emotional, without a gleam of challenge in her. Suddenly it all came to her as if it had happened: “I wanted to run like mad to you when I saw you but I was terrified he might still be looking. — Any minute, any minute, you might have — He thought it wasn’t safe for me, can you imagine, I couldn’t get rid of him. I wanted to rush to you—” She broke off and began to giggle, holding his hands and moving them in hers in emphasis of her words—”A kind farmer. He was, really. A nice man.”

“Let’s get off his land,” said Gideon.

“Oh no, it’s not his. He told me, it’s his neighbour’s.”

He was pulling up the blanket. They fell into a pantomime of crazy haste, dropping their things, struggling and laughing, tussling.

What she had spilt was like mercury and rolled away into the corners of her being, impossible ever to recover and confine again.

The car surrounded them with the clutter of their inhabitation, enclosing and familiar as an untidy room where one day is not cleared away before another piles on top of it. Already they had a life together, in that car. Like any other life, it was manifest in biscuit crumbs, aspirins, cigarette boxes kept for the notes on the back, broken objects of use (a pair of sunglasses, a sandal without a buckle) and other objects that had become indispensable, not in the function for which they were intended, but in adaptation to a need — the fluffy red towel that was perfect for keeping the draught off Ann’s knees, and the plastic cosmetic bottle that they used to hold lemon juice. Already the inanimate bore witness to and was imbued with whatever had been felt and thought in that car, the love-making, the hours when nothing was said and attention streamed along with the passing road, the talk, the fatigue, the jokes. When Ann settled in and her eyes dropped to the level of the grey dashboard with its tinny pattern of grilles and dials, the dead half-hours were marked there for her: the time when she did not know why she was here rather than anywhere else. If the exciting silent dialogue of her presence and the man beside her ceased for a moment to sound in that place in herself where she had first heard it, she grew restless, pacing the logic of slots, circles and knobs.