Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

‘Not really. That’s the little one?’

‘He writes well — I think. I don’t mean his job — he’s a journalist on a paper for Africans that’s published in English. His own stuff, stories and so on. And he writes music.’

‘And Sitole? What’s he do?’

‘Insurance agent. He used to be a newspaper man, too. He spent a year in England after the war.’

‘Is that the important thing about him?’

‘Yes.’ She looked at me in my innocence. ‘That’s rather like returning from that bourne whence no traveller returns. Africans can’t pop in and out of Africa.’

The African girl had been persuaded, giggling, away from the wall, and now she sat awkwardly on a table, among the bottles, disposing her head and her hands in the manner of someone who is about to sing. The gramophone was stopped. In the hastily assembled silence (a voice cried out: What’s happened to the music, damn it? — a group of talkers were shushed, Sylvia crept grandly about refilling glasses with wine) she assumed a professional coquetry. She sang a popular torch song, in the innocent, sensual voice that I have always enjoyed in American Negro singers, the pagan voice in which sex is not suggestive and guilty, but overt and fine. She tried to imitate the vocal titillations of white singers she must have heard on records, but the strange shrill of her high notes and the gentleness of her low notes escaped artifice: all the warm, continuous gamut of sensuality was there, from the mother’s breast to the lover’s bed. Delight was like a sudden, simple happiness in the room; the catalyst that I have sometimes seen come upon the isolated units of an audience at a concert. She sang on; another torch song — a piece of wild, ritualistic swing that sent the young Peter off dancing to himself in a corner, panting and jerking — even a sentimental ballad in Yiddish, and then songs in her own tongue and others that sounded the same to me. Sometimes, from across the room, Sam and Peter would come in like the toll of two big bells, or the low accent of the big bass. Sylvia, who had tiptoed up beside Anna Louw, whispered, ‘Thank God she sings, at least. Their women never utter. One simply c-can’t have them.’

‘How did she get here?’ I asked, since it was obviously not by invitation. ‘The way I did?’

Anna laughed, ‘Steven must have brought her. Quite a triumph; she’s very popular. She’s Betty Ntolo. She sings with their best band.’

When her songs were over, the African girl was danced round once by the untidy young man who had talked about painting, and then returned to the chair in which she had been sitting all evening. Once she was not performing, an insurmountable naïveté cast her, so to speak, underfoot; it was impossible to rescue her from it, because the moment anyone, with a polite word or an invitation to dance, made an attempt, they threatened to go down with her in the threshing ineptness of her giggling unresponse. I danced with her, for three or four interminable minutes. I had gone up to her to tell her how much I liked her songs, but once I had said this, and she had giggled as if she were going to bring out something paralysingly funny, and then said the single word: ‘Yes,’ I was aware that I couldn’t simply walk away, and couldn’t carry the conversation one monosyllable further. So I asked her to dance, a request to which she could, and did, respond by getting to her feet, tittering, and saying nothing.

She had a pretty, golden-brown face powdered dull, and a sooty beauty-spot was drawn next to her left eye; her ears, like Peter’s, were smaller and neater than any adult ears I had ever seen, and in them hung large gilt hoops. She wore a kind of turban of black chiffon that covered her hair, and was secured with gilt-nobbed hatpins. Every now and then, as she followed me, her pink tongue came out to touch her top lip and looked pleasing against her white teeth. She had large, round, prominent eyes, bovine and rather yellowed. They were quite blank; as if, here, she was frightened to think.

The top half of her body was slight and her waist small, but she was weighted down with great solid hams, monumental calves, and feet that made trumpery out of the high-heeled sandals strapped round them.

I said to her, ‘I hear you sing with a band.’

‘Yes.’ Like a child trapped in the kindly interrogation of a well-meaning uncle.

‘What’s the band called?’

She answered something unintelligible; her brown hand with its meaningless armour of red-painted nails was cold with pride and misery.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch it.’ I bent my head to her.

Like many singers, who successfully manage half a dozen languages in as many songs, she was not so good when she spoke. ‘The Township Ten,’ she said, with a strong accent.

The Indians were going; the wife stood at the door with a camel-hair coat over her sari, patient and bored, while the husband made his conscientious round of farewells. Anna was dancing with the Englishman with the baby teeth, and the redhead, suddenly before me, blew a cloud of smoke between her face and mine. When I had led the African girl to a chair, I went back to the redhead. ‘About time,’ she said.

‘You’ve been much occupied.’

As we danced, she leant her head back to talk and her two breasts touched my chest firmly and distinctly, buttonholing me.

‘Stanley’s a bloody leech,’ she said. ‘You drunk?’

‘No.’

‘So’m I. Let’s have some wine.’

We went, clumsily arm-about, like two boxers after a fight, to the drinks. ‘How’d you like to have a picture like that of yourself in your room, Sam?’ Steven Sitole was saying. ‘Oh I know it’s revolting to have oneself staring at oneself all the time,’ said Sylvia, hiding her face in her glass of wine. When she suddenly spoke fluently, it was as if some other self were speaking up inside her. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Sam, admiring a foreign custom. ‘I think, for a woman, it’s rather nice.’ ‘A rep-proach to me, a reproach to i-idiotic vanity-did I ever look like that? Or d-do I only think n-now that I did? Now that I can blame the difference on baggy eyes and wrinkles and a jacket crown on a tooth?’

I am bad at caressing women publicly; I looked foolishly encumbered by the redhead, and I knew it, and so all the pleasure was gone from the contact with her tall, warm body. We dropped apart and she went to Stanley, murmuring up to him in relief at the escape. I drank somebody’s glass of wine and looked from Sylvia to her portrait. ‘When was it done?’ ‘Oh don’t be so bloody t-tactless!’ There was laughter. The portrait looked right into your eyes, the way she herself did; but she must have been much more self-centred then: the face looked aware of the feather curving down from the hat, the shadows exchanged by the black hair and the wine-coloured dress. It was a portrait of a woman thinking about herself. ‘A Spanish or Italian beauty,’ I said.

‘Why is that always considered the compliment?’ Sylvia asked the company. ‘I’m a Jewess; couldn’t one say I used to be a beautiful one?’

‘Berenice, then,’ I said, looking at her. ‘That’s exactly it. The beautiful queen.’ Talk and laughter and argument swept another way. I could not follow it because of a pressing need; I wandered through the house but did not come upon the bathroom, so I went out into the dark garden, beyond the light of the windows. The physical relief, the fresh night air after the close room, and slow, pleasant turning of the wine in my head brought me to peace with myself. I staggered a little, but I was at home on this earth. A shape like my own brushed past the shrubs, and I was joined by someone. It was Steven Sitole. ‘What are you doing here?’ he said, as we stood companionably. I laughed. ‘Same as you.’