Nadine Gordimer - Occasion for Loving

Jessie registered the succession of dances mechanically, with half-attention; she had seen them often before, not only as a child, but as part of a dutiful “showing around” for visitors. Morgan was sitting not far behind her, but she thought about him as if he were not there, going over the five minutes she had spent with him in his room the afternoon before. The incident went up and down, like a balloon; now it seemed small and unremarkable; then another interpretation made it rise all round her. Yet while she was thinking of other things, her attention began to fix, here and there, upon what was going on before her eyes. There was a man whose muscles moved independently, like a current beneath the surface of his skin; marvellous life informed his ridiculous figure, and shook off the feathers and rags that decked him. Others emerged from and then were merged with the wild line of dancers. They pranced, leapt, grovelled and shook, taking on their own personal characteristics — tall, small; smooth, boy’s face or lumpy, coarse man’s; comic, ferocious or inspired — and then adding themselves to, losing themselves in the group again. Their feet echoed through Jessie’s ribs; she felt the hollow beat inside her. The Chinese-sounding music of the Chopi pianos, wooden xylophones large and small, bass and treble, with resonators made of jam tins, ran up and down behind the incessant shrill racket of whistles. Now and then a man opened his mouth and a shout came out that is heard no more wherever there are cities; a voice bellowed across great rivers, a voice that bellies wordlessly through the air, like the trumpeting of an elephant or the panting that follows the lion’s roar.

And it was all fun. It all meant nothing. There was no death in it; no joy. No war, and no harvest. The excitement rose, like a breath drawn in, between dancers and watchers, and it had no meaning. The watchers had never danced, the dancers had forgotten why they danced. They mummed an ugly splendid savagery, a broken ethos, well lost; unspeakable sadness came to Jessie, her body trembled with pain. They sang and danced and trampled the past under their feet. Gone, and one must not wish it back. But gone … The crazed Lear of old Africa rushed to and fro on the tarred arena, and the people clapped. She was clapping, too — her hands were stinging — and her eyes, behind the sunglasses, were filled with heavy, cold tears. It was no place to weep, she knew. This was no place to shed such tears. They were not tears of sentiment. They came from horror and hollowness.

She held in her mind at once, for a moment, all that belonged to horror and hollowness, and that seemed to have foreshadowed it, flitting bat-like through the last few days: the night in which she had awakened twice, once to her own sleeping house, and once to that other time and place in her mother’s house; Morgan, lying shut away with his radio in the kernel of the afternoon. Her hand went out, and took another’s; it turned out to be the hand of Madge, her daughter, who never took her eyes from the dancers, and it was as cold as her own. Yet slowly it restored her to the surface facts of life, and she was able, at the interval, to troop out with the others, exchanging the dazed smiles of those who have just been entertained, and make her way to the rustic hut where the ladies of the mine were selling tea and cake.

After the performance, Boaz wanted to have a closer look at some of the musical instruments. He wanted to see how the miners devised substitutes for the traditional materials out of which such instruments were made. The Africans grinned at him encouragingly while he turned their xylophones upside down, and they burst into laughter when he played one quite creditably. He lost himself; his sallow face closed with complete and exclusive interest. He kept up a patter, not addressed to anyone in particular. “These tins give quite a lively note, in a way. But you lose that light boum! quality, the round, die-away sound that you get from a proper gourd resonator. It’s important to find gourds of exactly the right size and shape to resonate xylophones.” Ann was taking photographs of the warriors with feather-duster tails. They lined up for the photographers like children in class. “Come on!” she wheedled. “Let’s have some life.” But they only stood more stiffly to attention.

“The art of making some of these things is dying out, even in the kraals,” Boaz said. “Most of them were not originally home-made, in the sense that everyone made his own. There were men who were instrument-makers, and you ordered your timbila or mbira or whatever it was from them. Now the old chaps are disappearing, and the young chaps are busy acquiring other skills in the towns. In time, no one’ll remember how to make certain instruments any more.”

“Well, these chaps seem to,” said someone.

“Yes, but they come recruited from tribal life — reserves and so on. They weren’t born in the locations. And look how the instruments they make have changed! They’ve had to adapt them to the material they find around them, here. Tin cans. Store stuff. Soon they’ll be new instruments almost entirely.”

“Ah well, that’s all right,” said Jessie, speaking suddenly. “Don’t you think that’s the best thing, Boaz?”

He looked at the woman and spoke almost tenderly. “I don’t know,” he said with a smile. “In my job, I like to find instruments in their true form … But, of course, yes, it must be.”

“It was marvellous!” Ann came running up to them. “Wasn’t it! I saw you clapping, Jessie!”

“Madge was enchanted,” said Jessie. “The other two fidgeted and lost interest after a bit, but Madge never moved.”

“Boaz,” said Ann, biting on the long, phosphorescent-pink nail of her thumb, and narrowing her eyes, “I want to see the real thing. You know? I want to go into the wilds and see—”

“Oh of course,” he said. He always parried her, quickly became playful, joked. “Bongo-bongo, savage rites, secret ceremonies.”

“What is it that you’d really like to do?” Jessie asked her curiously.

And unexpectedly, the girl gave weight to the question. She hesitated, and then looked at Jessie honestly, and said, with a laugh, “Oh I like to find new things. Things I don’t know. People not like the people I know.”

“Experience outside what you think you were meant for.”

The girl laughed.

“That’s just the sort of thing my mother and father said when I told them I was going to marry Boaz and that he was a Jew.”

As they walked away, the ancient instruments of Africa struck up the Colonel Bogey march.

A creature who did not exist any more, the girl Jessica Tibbett aged seventeen, long ago had spent Christmas weekend away at a resort with her mother and stepfather.

Bruno Fuecht with his European sophistication and Mrs. Fuecht with the assumption of it that she had got from him did not have much taste for the Saturnalian side of the festival; as a rationalist whose only experience of faith had been faith in the political creeds current in his youth, the true occasion did not move him, and although Mrs. Fuecht had once been a devout Anglican, she seemed to feel that through her marriage to him she had lost the right to the meaning of Christ’s birth. Jessie did not remember ever having been taken to church at Christmas (perhaps she had gone once, when she was very small and her father was still alive?) and apart from the excitement in the air, the coloured lights in the streets and the presents in the shops, the occasion was simply a public holiday like any other.

That year they decided at the last minute that they wanted to get away — the phrase was Mrs. Fuecht’s, and implied a press of guests and gaiety. But the truth was that silent lack of harmony in the house, the deadly peace between three people who did not even guess at each other’s thoughts, became unbearable at the combination of this time of year and this time of the girl Jessie’s life. Even the most vulgar side of Christmas — the family booziness and the money-making sentiment of the shops — was a reproach to them for their lack of human weakness, their disqualification to stand in the comfort of the herd. And the child’s emergence as a grown-up, no longer only victim but also witness of the unexplained state, was something all three must seek protection from in the anonymous safety in numbers of some place, such as an hotel, where they did not belong.