Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

There were no valleys between these hills for they were simply set down, on the flat veld. Patches of tough green grass and short waving grasses showed, but mostly the growth was weird, wet and thin; a few cows would stand in the reeds of an indefinite swampy patch where the ooze shone mother-of-pearl, like oil; a rectangular lake out of which pipes humped had sheets of violet and pink, like a crude water-colour. In some places there was no earth but a bare, grey scum that had dried and cracked open. And there was black earth, round a disused coal mine, where somone had once thrown away a peach pip, and it had grown into a tree, making out of the coal dirt some hard, hairy green peaches.

There were trees; eucalyptus trees, confined to plantations that formed grey geometrical shapes in which, as you passed, you caught a glimpse of white, peeling branches like the flash of flesh. A few spindly outcasts, eucalyptus and wattle, got some sort of living in tortured angles against the steep sides of the yellow hills.

It was a man-made place in quite a different sense from that of a city. (Quite a different sense from that of the midlands in England, too, or the Welsh coal-country.) If it had not been for the hills, the horizon would have been a matter of the limitations of the human eye. Men themselves had made their own spatial boundaries, themselves had created the natural features of hills, water, and woods. What they had made, in the emptiness, was the symbol rather than the thing itself. The cyanide dumps were not hills, the dams of chemically-treated water pumped from underground were not lakes, the plantations were not woods: but they suggested them, they stood for them. And like all true fantasies, this one had been created subconsciously. The people who had made this landscape had merely been concerned to dump above ground, out of the way, the waste matter that was incidental to the recovery of gold.

The towns themselves were quite another matter. They were conscious creations, all right. They were ugly, cheap, and jazzily dreary, got up in civic ‘beautifying’ efforts on the taste level of a housemaid’s Sunday-best. The main street invariably led in one end of the town and out the other, and on the way were the lines of shops, offering, in coloured neon, fish-and-chips and furniture on terms and building-loans and gents’ outfitting, grinning brides and kiddies in the photographer’s, dingy bars in the brewers’ chain of hotels, a cinema with Cinemascope and, of course, the town hall with the municipal coat-of-arms picked out in pansies between fat palms like pineapples. One of these places had coloured lights on fancy wire frames arched across the street at twenty-foot intervals; at the end of the diminishing vista, you could just see the headgear of the nearest mine-shaft. In each town I visited the local booksellers — there was a newsagents’ chain, like the brewers’ chain, running through them all, and usually one other independent shop-and talked shop to them as best I could before getting to the business of taking their orders for new Aden Parrot books. Most of them were nice chaps, who stuck doggedly to what they knew they could sell, and were as nervous about ordering a new author as the proprietor of a grocery shop might be of offering his customers an unfamiliar kind of cheese; they reminded me of the comfortable pipe-smokers who kept the local bookseller and stationer’s in the English seaside towns of my childhood.

I had felt that I owed Anna Louw some sort of entertainment or hospitality, and so I had asked her to come to a cinema with me on the Friday night. When I got back to Johannesburg from my last day’s journeying about the East Rand, I felt too tired to bother with her instructions about buses and routes (she had asked me to dinner) and took a taxi to where she lived. The address was north of the town, on the way to the Alexanders’, in the pocket of a half-developed suburb that lay surrounded by, but neglected by contrast with, other suburbs. There she had a cottage in the grounds of a larger house; a kind of paste-board cottage that had been formed out of a reversal of the onion-peeling process: first there had been one room and a bathroom, weekend shelter for a casual guest from the big house, then someone had added a kitchen, and so a more stable existence was possible there, then a veranda, and, finally, the veranda had been closed-in and subdivided to make a small, cellular house. The first thing I noticed was the lowness of all the doors and ceilings; I had to dip my head to step into the softly-coloured complexity of Anna’s house. It was like stooping to look into a nest or a cave, a hidden, personal place that exists unperturbed under the unnoticing eye of the passing world.

Two or three people were sitting about the small living-room; the windows were open wide, and I had a sense of the light running out, moving from the room like a tide. ‘Hullo, Mr Hood,’ said little Sam, welcomingly. Anna introduced me to a dumpy, grey-haired woman in slacks, who kept saying, in a strong Hollands accent, ‘I got do go, now, my deer, eh? I got do go now.’ Steven was there. He got up from the divan under the windows, where he had been sitting, and backed away in invitation to me to sit down. He shook hands. ‘Hallo, how are you? This is a very comfortable place.’ He was grinning, with his glass dangling in his hand, held by the rim. Glasses and a porcelain vase shone once, as the ebb in passing sometimes turns over bright objects to gleam for a moment out of the mud.

‘I can’t make out what I’m pouring,’ said Anna, and switched on a lamp.

‘Doesn’t matter, perhaps it’ll turn out something interesting,’ said Steven. They all stirred in the sudden warm light; started a little in themselves as shadows jumped out at once at angles from the objects in the room. ‘No!’ said the Hollander, standing up and shaking her thick body inside her slacks; I saw that her coarse hair was streaked with its original yellow, like the nicotine stains on the fingers of heavy smokers. ‘I must go, Anna!’

Anna hurried back to the circle of the lamplight after seeing her off. ‘Toby! Now please pour yourself a drink!’ ‘Got one,’ I held it up. She was carefully dressed, in red, and she looked suddenly pretty in the vivid way of dark women. Perhaps because she was at home, she seemed to have relaxed, too, that measured seriousness of manner that I associated with her.’ I’m sorry!’ she said.’ She’s not a bad old thing at all.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Oh it was before you came. You wouldn’t notice it so much.’ She turned to the others, apologetic, but confident that they would share her amusement at the same time.

‘Going, going, never gone,’ said Steven, putting down his glass and waving his hands.

‘I think she’s a nice lady,’ said little Sam. ‘Nothing wrong with her.’

‘She came in — she occasionally comes in just about this time, or after supper, for coffee with me — but when she saw Sam and Steven she kept saying, all the time, I must go, I must go.’

‘But she didn’t!’ said Steven.

Anna asked me how I’d got there, and then we got talking about the car I needed, and what kind it should be, and where I should get it. The subject of cars is paraffin on the fire of talk among most men, and Steven and Sam lit up at once in passionate discussion. Sam said that I should get a new small British or Continental car that would be cheap to run. Steven plumped for a good second-hand job, a big powerful American car, a model of a reliable year, that, once overhauled, would go like new. ‘What’s a good of a car without power? What d’you want a machine without power for? May as well walk,’ he cried flamboyantly to Sam. ‘Steven, man,’ said Sam, planting himself before him to get a hearing, ‘a second-hand car spends more time in the garage than on the road.’