Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

A woman waved a glass at Anna across the room, from here and there, voices greeted her; we passed a little group deep and oblivious in some argument as cows in a stream, passed a slender tense man who smiled at Anna on bad baby teeth, in an aside from his tête-à-tête with a tall redhead, and made our way to a table crowded with bottles. It was true, there were no clean glasses — but we found two — the kind that have once contained cheese spread, and have a flower motif painted on the outside — that were at least empty.

A party has something in common with a battlefield in that, if you are in it, of it, you do not see it; your tête-á-tête or the little group in which you drink and talk is the party. But if you are a stranger, recognizing no one, drawn into no private context of friendship, there is a time, at the beginning of the evening, when you see the composition of the party as the armchair strategist sees the battle: steadily, formally, and whole.

As the stiff gin stole about my body, like a torch opening up a dark house, I saw the pattern of that room with an almost omniscient eye. Those other faces, dark faces, other hands, dark hands, emerging from the same old coatsleeves, made a difference. The pattern had the tangled fascination of an Oriental rug my mother once had, where, if you looked, the scrolls and flowers that you expected to see were also found to be people, animals, jokes, and legends; things that, in real life, are not found together, cheek by jowl in the space of one experience. Nothing very remarkable was happening in the room; three Africans were talking to each other, a conspicuously well-dressed Indian was explaining something surprising to a white man and woman (you could see the serious, eager incredulity on their faces), the scrum of white people near the door still kept head-down over the ball of their discussion, there was the usual couple — a white one — who have made of the party a place to be alone together, and the only African woman there — as far as I could see — sat ignored, smiling into a tumbler of wine. All these people lived together in one country, anyway; all their lines were entangled by propinquity.

Yet to have them in one room together, in the voluntary context of a party — to have them there because they wished to be there — did have, even for me, after one month in their country, the quality of the remarkable: the ordinary social pattern seemed as intricate and ambiguous in its composition as the Oriental rug.

A man broke away from the group of Africans and came up to get himself a drink; he had the sauntering, abstracted air of the man who always knows where the drinks are kept; ‘The brandy run out?’ he said to me. It was the first word a black man spoke to me that wasn’t between master and servant. I moved away from the table so that he could look. ‘See if Sylvia can raise another bottle,’ he mumbled, and turned to the door through which she had gone earlier. Then he saw Anna. ‘I knew you’d be somewhere here!’ he said, grinning. He was a tall, thin man, with a long waist and a small round head. He was the pleasant, light colour of polished wood and his hair was like wool embroidery. His eyes were far away, burnt-out; he had a small, delicately-made nose, from whose characteristically flattened tip the nostrils curled back, and the gathered-together bones of his face gave prominence to his large mouth. When he smiled, charmingly, at Anna, he showed a battleground of gaps and fine broken teeth. ‘It seems people just can’t do without either of us, that’s all,’ said Anna, smiling. ‘How’ve you been?’

‘Oh, not bad, not bad.’

‘This is Mr Hood, Steven — I don’t think you told me your other name, did you?’ she added, to me.

‘Toby. Like the jugs.’

The other man laughed. ‘That’s a good name. That should have been the name for me.’

‘Toby Hood, just from England — Steven Sitole.’ We shook hands. He went through the formula absently: how-do-you-do, pleased-to-meet-you. ‘How’s your drink, Mr Hood?’

‘Not good,’ I said, for my glass was empty.

‘Let me fix it for you,’ he said, with expansive party amiability. ‘And yours too, Anna.’

‘No, Steven, you’re a bad influence. I must set myself a time limit. Not more than one drink an hour.’

‘She’s quite a one for time limits, isn’t she?’ I said.

Steven was tipping gin into my glass. ‘Is she?’

Indicating Steven, she said to me: ‘We only meet at parties, and they’re inclined to be timeless.’

He laughed at her admiringly, as if he had certain expectations of her, and she always came up to them. He was familiar and at ease with her, but the familiarity and ease were those of a foreigner: a Frenchman, Italian, or German not sure whether the English woman whom he has met is a fair sample of all the English women whom he will never know, or an exception under no circumstances to be regarded as representative.

His purpose, which was the bottle of brandy, was not to be deflected, and once he had given me my drink, he excused himself. Anna introduced me to the young man with the redhead — an Englishman — and then we drifted over to the earnest group near the door, which, in its turn, had taken in the Indian, Jimmy Naidoo, and his wife, who sat — on something so low and small that it was hidden by the draperies of her yellow sari — ample and vague in outline as a piece of municipal statuary whose sculptor has not dared attempt the feet. All the rest stood, and she looked up into the talk with an attentive and well-brought-up air, a sallow face with the sleepless look of deeply-ringed eyes. The other woman in the group was an Englishwoman with a Modigliani neck rising white and splendid to a slightly receding chin and a thick streaky coil of blonde hair that rested like a heavy hand on her nape; white arms and hands long and perfect, as if the mould in which they had been cast had just been gently cracked from them, were crossed over a flattened and exhausted-looking body in a green velvet dress. She had the ghost of a voice, and she had once been a painter; they were talking about painting. ‘If I could paint,’ said a grey-haired man who screwed up his eyes and bared his lower teeth in attack when he talked, ‘- especially if I painted in this country — I’d revive literary painting. There are too many landscape painters here. They don’t know how to deal with man, so they leave him out.’

‘Or if they do put him in, they use only the picturesque aspect — they treat a face or a figure as if it were a tree,’ said a young man who seemed to have struggled with his clothes and lost — the sleeves of his brown shirt hung over his wrists, but the collar was too small and had popped open under a very big woollen tie.

‘What do you have in mind when you say literary painting?’

‘“When did you last see your father,”’ whispered the Englishwoman, who had been introduced to me as Dorothea Welz.

‘And why not?’ said the grey-haired man. ‘What’s wrong with pictures that tell a story?’

‘Fine for backache pills,’ said Naidoo, beaming.

‘I think he means what I call problem pictures,’ someone else said. ‘A scene that poses a certain situation.’

‘That’s what he said. That’s what literary painting is.’

‘- a white child playing with an expensive toy under the eye of an African in one of those fancy maid’s uniforms, and in the street outside the garden you see some tsotsis sauntering past — ’

‘Oh Christ!’

‘. . much abstract painting is, in fact, literary painting, the expression of ideas, what else can you call it?’

‘. . those nubile Zulu maidens, all boot-polish breasts and flashing teeth.’

‘When are you going to paint again, Dorothea?’ said the untidy young man, as if he were in the habit of questioning everybody about everything.