Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

The street had the comforting, out-dated sinisterness of a back-alley habitation, deserted and late at night. I have grown up to a world whose bogeys are bombs and the horrors of atomic radiation; in people like me there is a certain nostalgia about the personal, palpable threat of flesh-and-blood robbers and assassins, those bogeys of the past, long out-shadowed in evil. I felt a mild and pleasant excitement, adjunct to my drunkenness. Steven went along with the happy ease of a man who could have found his way in his sleep; he was at home in a dark and lonely street. He sang softly, under his breath, in his own language; so softly, he might have been breathing music. There was a little street-light, rheumy and high up, on the corner, and he took the top of my arm in his thin, hard hand and guided me to the right. There was some light here and there, behind windows — as if the dark had worn thin. And one door, leading right out on to the pavement, was open. From it, light the colour of orangeade made a geometrical shape of brightness in the dark. ‘No good,’ murmured Steven, and turned me sharply round again. ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘If the door’s open, the place is shut; that’s wrong.’ At the corner once more, I saw him grinning at me affectionately under the pale splash of the street-lamp: ‘I’m looking after you, Mr Hood.’ We felt we understood each other very well, in the manner that drunks do; just as they may equally suddenly feel curdled with long-borne grievances against each other, and may be compelled to fight.

‘Here.’ We turned into an unlit yard, with two rows of rooms or cottages — each row seemed to be under one continuous roof, but there were four or five doors in the length of each. They were shut against the night as if they were deserted and empty, but our feet were sucked by mud round a tap that snivelled and drizzled, and there was a strong smell of rotting vegetables, and the general sourness of a much-used place. Beyond and slightly behind the end wall of the right-hand row, there was a small detached building with some kind of lean-to porch attached — a creeper grew over it like a fishnet draped to dry. Steven pushed me up three broken steps and knocked on the door. The knock gave back its own sound; but in a moment the door opened the width of a face and a voice spoke, sleepily it seemed to me, and then changed its tone with recognition when Steven murmured. Of course I could not understand what was said. But we went in, past a woman’s face with a woollen scarf wrapped round the head, under the candle she held against the wall. I remember noticing that it was the swollen-looking face of a stupid woman. We went through a cave of a room where something smallish, probably a child, was asleep on an iron bed, and the candle caught, in passing, a bunch of paper roses and a primus stove, and then into a larger room with walls painted olive green half-way up like the waiting room in a station, and an electric bulb with a celluloid shade hanging over a table where four or five men did not look up. There was also another group, sitting on a bed, and they stubbed out their laughter, almost with relief, as if it had gone on too long beyond the merit of what had occasioned it, as we came in, and started talking in what, even in a language I didn’t understand, I could recognize as the interrogatory tone of a change of subject. Everyone was drinking, but there were no bottles in sight. On the walls, a huge Coca-Cola calendar — a girl on a beach, in bathing costume and accompanied by a tiny radio and a carrier of Coca-Cola — hung with the look of inevitability of a holy picture given its niche. It was the barest room I had ever been in in my life; it depended entirely on humans.

Most of the men seemed to know Steven. If they happened to catch his eye they nodded; one or two said something. A man in American-looking trousers and a pastel shirt with a bow tie got up. Steven asked him a question; he answered; Steven nodded. The man went out of the door — not the door by which we had entered, but another next to the chimney that had no fireplace beneath it, and in a moment came back with two tumblers. ‘Have you got two dollars?’ said Steven, taking a half-crown out of his pocket. I gave him a pound; ‘Ten bob’ll do,’ he said, as he took it. He paid for the drinks and for a moment, as the change was counted out, I saw, very close, the face of the man who had brought them; a broad face, smooth and the colour of olive oil, almost Chinese-looking, with a very large straight mouth whose width was accentuated by a pitch-black moustache that followed the outline of the upper lip closely, and even went down, parenthetically, round the two sides.

‘You drink brandy and coke?’ said Steven.

Room was made for us at the table; a man in the grease-stiff cap of a garage attendant lifted his head from his arms and regarded me as if he believed he were seeing me with some inner sight, the drunk’s sight. Steven had taken his drink at a gulp. He said, patronizingly, ‘I should have taken you to one of the Vrededorp places, where other whites come, and you wouldn’t be noticed.’ ‘Who comes?’ I said; I was feeling the conspicuous unimportance that a child feels in a room full of words he doesn’t understand. ‘Not many like you,’ Steven laughed, narrowing his nostrils and lifting his chin as if he were telling me something highly complimentary. ‘White bums and down-and-outs.’ Then he called across my head to the group talking on the bed; a young man in one of those cheap knit shirts with a picture stamped on the chest, took up the exchange, which was laughing, scornful, and animated. I had the feeling it might be about me. Perhaps it was. I didn’t care. You always think people are talking about you when they use a foreign language.

Two men left; their hands were pushed into their pockets in the manner of those whose pockets are empty. Like the room, this shebeen in which they had taken their pleasure, they were bared. They had nothing but themselves. Chequebooks, those little purses women have, foam-rubber cushions, the deathly moonlight of fluorescent strips; these things came to my mind confusedly, mockery and salvation. I felt very drunk; all the room was retreating from me, draining away like water down a plug-hole, with a roaring gurgle that I didn’t understand. Steven’s voice, right in my ear because it was English, was saying, ‘I was good at darts in England. I used to walk into the pub and take anybody on. They used to call me Lucky. Imagine that. Why d’you think they called me Lucky?’

‘You must call me Toby,’ I said, feeling it was urgent.

‘Did they call me Lucky because they call you Toby?’ said Steven, finishing another brandy. I pictured, with the dreamy pleasure of casting together the here and there, the tall black mascot in the London pub. I seemed to feel, myself, the spurious superstitious power of the other race; if you sleep with a Jewess (Negress, Chinese) you will never want any other kind again, gipsies read the future — and Queequeg, I saw Queequeg like those pictures I’d seen of American cigar-store Indians. I said something to Steven about Queequeg but he’d never heard of Moby Dick. He said, ‘We like to read the Russians. You’ll see, Africans want to read Dostoyevsky, man, they read lots of Dostoyevsky.’

I said, ‘ You read that somewhere, Steven.’

There was a shout of laughter from the group in the corner.

He laughed in ready guilt. ‘Anyway, a few do. They read Dostoyevsky because they want to feel miserable, to glory in another misery. I follow the racing page,’ he added swaggeringly. But even he didn’t believe in himself, as a man of the world. ‘The comics,’ he said, putting on a serious, considering face, ‘and the comics.

‘Trouble with me,’ he went on, ‘I don’t want to feel miserable, I don’t want any glory out of it. Sam and Peter and all those others, yap-yap all the time, chewing over the same old thing, this they’ve taken from us, that they’ve denied our children, pass laws, injustice — agh, I’m sick of it. Sick of feeling half a man. I don’t want to be bothered with black men’s troubles. You know that, Toby? These — ’ and he circled the noisy room with a movement of his slim black hand with the too-long fingernails and a signet-ring in which a piece of red glass winked, exasperated and distasteful.