Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

She came upon Gideon in the living-room next morning while Ann had gone up to the village with the little girls. He was drawing, absorbed but not prepared, the paper backed by a wad of newspapers, his head falling back negligently now and then on the plump chair. Jessie twisted her neck to see. He softened the thick charcoal line with his thumb. “She’s beautiful,” Jessie said.

“She is.”

She watched him, amused by his attitude of repose, while his hand and eye worked on on their own.

“Gideon, you’ve got a wife somewhere, I suppose?”

“In Bloemfontein, to be exact.”

When she had been in the living-room a certain time, she was always drawn to the curtain that sagged and the bit of carpet that had frayed away. Sometimes, as now, she even wandered up to these things as if she were going to mend them. She slid out of her sandals and stood on the divan to take a look at the top of the curtain, where it hooked to a rail. “I’ve got a child, too,” Gideon said. “I don’t know if I’d know him if I saw him somewhere.”

She was trying to work loose a runner that had rusted against the rail, and her voice was tight with effort. “Oh why is it like that?”

“You change.”

She could not get the runner free and stopped, with the confusion of an obstinate task in her face. “But it’s like lopping off fingers. In the end your life is nothing but bits and pieces.”

He did not want to be reminded of the woman who had been his wife and did not know what had made him suddenly mention the child. “What’s gone is gone,” he said.

“Then what’s going to be left in the end?” She stood there on the bed. “In a year’s time, in five years, this ’ll be gone perhaps. You’ll see yourself here as if it happened in someone else’s life.”

He saw that this frightened her in some way, but there was no room in him for curiosity about others, there was no part of his apprehension that was not cut off by the concentration of forces that had brought him there; by what he shared with the girl, and what he could not share with her. He could not answer the woman, either, with the rush of affirmation for the present that suddenly came to him — but this is my life! Yet she spoke as if he had: “You can’t pick and choose,” she said. “You have either to accept everything you’ve been and done, or nothing. If the past is going to be past, finished, this will be as lost as the things you want to lose.”

“There are things that are over and done with,” he said. “You must know how it is.”

“I know how it is. You shed yourself every now and then, like a snake.”

“Got to live,” he said with a shrug.

“What’s one going to be, finally? The last skin before one dies?”

He laughed. “—Ah but it’s different. You have a nice settled life that goes on, a home and so on. If things get too hot here, you’ll take your husband and your children and go and live the same way you’ve always done, only somewhere else, isn’t that so, Jessie? — You’ve got the man you want, haven’t you?” he added.

“Yes, but I lived before I loved him, and maybe I’ll go on living after. I had another husband. I have another child. Sometimes I don’t know him when I see him …” She seemed to expect something, and he looked up for a moment, “But I am what I was then as well as what I am now; or I’m nothing.”

His attention covered the restive, furtive look in his eyes. She knew this withdrawal that came sometimes in the closest conversation, when you were made aware that you had lost yourself in the white man’s preoccupations, when you were relegated to a half-world of doubts and nigglings that only whites afforded and deserved.

“I don’t see much sense in digging up the past.”

She smiled, looking at him from a distance. “We’re not talking about the same thing. It’s a question of freedom.”

“Freedom?” He was astonished, derisive.

“There’s more than one kind, you know.”

“Well, one kind would do for me.”

“Yes, perhaps it would, because you haven’t got it. Perhaps you’ll never have to ask yourself why you live. — A political struggle like yours makes everything very simple.”

“You think so?”

“Of course it does. You’re completely taken up with the practical means of changing the circumstances of your life. — Right, the ideological ones, too. The realisation — whatever you like to call it — the sense of your life would be the attainment of this change, or how near you’d get to it, before you die. One knock-out experience after another falls on your head, you die a dozen times, but the political struggle sticks you together again in the end. You’re always whole so far as that’s concerned. It’s all done from outside, and from necessity.”

“I don’t think it’s quite as passive as all that,” he said ironically.

“Passive! That’s the whole point. It’s all action, agony, decision — oh my God, it’s wonderful”—she made a mock blissful face, to break the mood between them.

He continued to work on his drawing after she had wandered out of the room. In each successive sketch it grew simpler, as the single line drew up the many into its power; the face disappeared the way an actual face disappears into acute awareness of it. Suddenly Ann was there, putting down a few little paper packets, momentarily still in the guise in which she had been seen in the store and the post office: the youthfully arrogant jaw and lips showing something of the beauty and desirability carelessly hidden by dark glasses and wild short hair. “Blades, cigarettes, soft rubber — this’s the only sort of thing they had.” He tried it, erasing one of the abandoned sketches. “They’re all too hard.” “I told them I’d bring it back if it wasn’t any good.” He smiled at her rough treatment of shopkeepers.

She was sitting in a chair with the blank regard of the dark glasses upon him. “I’ve got exactly four pounds and seventeen shillings,” she said.

He gave a questioning grunt. “I’ve got a couple of pounds.”

“No, you haven’t, you’ve got about fivepence less than I have.”

“Fivepence more.”

She remembered the glasses and took them off; he saw something he had never seen before, tears in her eyes as she was looking at him. “I hate them,” she said. “All around me in the shop and the post office.”

He knew she was afraid of going back to Johannesburg, to decisions and questions and advice and being answerable to others. But if they were to leave the country and go away together they would still have to go back to Boaz first, back to the Stilwell house where everything that had begun remained unresolved.

He was used to attack and recklessness in her and the change that showed in her sometimes now both dismayed and roused him. So she loved him, she was really his woman, this bright creature; he felt it under his hand when he was making love to her now, he felt it when she walked towards him in a room, or passed him food at table. But at the same time safety was gone out of their relationship: each had put himself in the other’s hands. Now he felt the weight of her being, strange, new, unaccustomed; and he gave over to her what was not even his own to give: he was aware of Mapulane (watching him drive off that day), away on that periphery to which passion banishes out of sight and sound the yelling, gesticulating influences that set themselves against it. He lay on the sand between the two women he could see with half-closed eyes, and among the children who ran to him with their treasures, and on this lonely beach destiny and history overlooked him; he could ignore both Shaka’s defeated kingdom around him, and the white man’s joke about it that he read each time he went to the lavatory … “vaseline, sandwiches, sawdust … God save the sugar farmers. Given this day … under my hand and great seal, Big Chief Shaka.” The black warrior and the white man’s derision of him; the savage ruined past and the conqueror’s mockery of it; both were dead and he suffered from neither.