Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

Steven wanted to go to a shebeen when we left. It was run by a man who was part Indian, part African, part white, and a Basuto woman with the proportions of a whale who called me ‘master’ in the intimate obsequiousness of a house servant who knows the family too well. Steven knew everybody there, flirted with the shrill coloured tarts who, drunk, reminded me of pantomime dames, and had about himself generally an air of sophistication and relief. He stood beside me, at last, twisting his cheap signet ring with the bit of red glass in it fondly, as if its shoddiness pleased him. ‘A place like Sam’s is all right,’ he said, ‘but it costs too much.’

‘His wife’s got quite a well-paid job, too, I gather, so I suppose they can manage,’ I said. I had already got over the bewilderment of the difference between what was well-paid for blacks and what was well-paid for whites; just as one becomes accustomed to translating values from one’s own currency to that of a foreign country in which one has lived for a little time. And I had learned to accept too, without embarrassment, the fact that I, with my not-very-generous salary, and my flat all to myself, was a rich man when I was in the townships.

‘I don’t mean just money. The effort and trouble. Keep up a place like that in a location. All the dirt, the easy-going, all round you. Imagine the way the neighbours look at you; you’re like a zoo! All the old women want to come and peer in the door to see what people do in such a house.’ Like most exhibitionistic people, Steven was a good mimic.

I laughed. ‘Still, it’s an achievement to manage to live that way, in a location.’

‘Ah,’ said Steven, ‘that’s it. It’s a showplace.’ He assumed a high falsetto, parody of some white woman’s voice he must have heard somewhere: ‘“. . an oasis of culture, my dear!” Is it a king’s house, a millionaire’s house? Man, it’s just an ordinary way to live.’

I saw what he meant. If living decently, following a modest taste for civilized things, meant living eccentrically or remarkably, one might prefer to refuse the right masquerading as a privilege.

‘Why should I guard like a cave of jewels,’ he said, changing his sharp-eyed fake ring from one finger to another, ‘a nice little house that any other man can have anywhere he likes in a street full of such houses?’ And he grinned at me with that careless aplomb, shrugging his shoulders and looking down his nose at himself, that gave him such an air, and always, wherever we went in the townships, drew the young bloods about him to hear what he would say next.

He was, without question, the most ‘popular’ person I have ever known. I put the word popular between the quotes of the suspect, because to me it connotes a man who gets the most votes in a presidential election at a golf club, and I don’t mean that sort of popularity. Perhaps ‘loved’ would be a better word. But he wasn’t exactly loved, either; he was too impersonal and elusive for that. I think they gloried in him, those hangers-on — they gloried in his white man’s ways produced unselfconsciously in their company, like a parlour trick that looks easy enough for anyone to learn. Looking always as if they’d just sheepishly awakened from a sleep with their clothes on, they sought something: was it the gum they pushed ceaselessly from one side of their mouths to the other, like the Americans do? Would the latest slang, in English, do it? Or the sports shirt with the pink and black collar? They did not know; they had not found out yet. But Steven had; they could see it, there he was. He had not gone under beneath his correspondence college B.A. the way black men did, becoming crushed and solemn with education, and the fit and cut of that aspect of the white man’s Johannesburg that dazzled them most hung on him as comfortably as his well-tailored jacket.

Feckless, aimless, like creatures flopping in the sand in evolution from water to land, they saw his slippery-footed ease between the black man’s element and the white. He was something new, and they worshipped the new, which lack of possessions made them believe must always be the better. He was a new kind of man, not a white man, but not quite a black man, either: a kind of flash — flash-in-the-pan — produced by the surface of the two societies in friction.

It never seemed odd or extraordinary to me that Steven himself, free of so many rooms, houses, shacks, and shebeens, had no particular place to live, during the time I knew him. He once told me that he had no idea how many times he had moved, in his lifetime; he had lost count. He had been born in a location in one of the Reef gold-mining towns, and except for his year in England, he had been moving from one township to another, from one room to another, ever since.

I could not imagine what sort of place would have been right as home, to Steven.

It was on a Sunday morning, after a party to celebrate the first of Steven’s moves since I had known him, that I went to see Cecil Rowe. The party was a warming- and naming-party for a house in a rakishly dingy part of Sophiatown where Steven had taken a room, in the company of his other bachelor cronies. It seemed to me highly unlikely that they were really living there, for there was little evidence of furniture or clothes — in fact, the place had the stunned and stripped look of a house that has been moved out of, rather than into — but it was blessed with jazz and brandy (someone even brought along a birthday cake) and it was duly named The House of Fame. (‘What’s it famous for?’ I asked, and Steven said, ‘Me, of course.’) The party ended about one on the peculiar note of promise of African parties, with all the men drifting off cheerfully into the dark to other assignations. I gave one or two of the lesser hangers-on lifts to various parts of the township, whose steep streets were still alive with strollers, tsotsis, lovers, quarrels, people singing, and drunks, and drove back to the shut-down quiet of the white town. My steps rang up the stairwell of the flats, and I had a sudden wave of homesickness that took the form of a vivid sense of a corner off Ebury Street, just below a little garden with wall-flowers smelling sweet and cold at night, where I used to go, one spring, to the flat of a girl with whom I was in love.

In the morning this mood of alienation persisted slightly — like most homesicknesses, it was for what I should have liked to have had, rather than what I really had left behind — and I thought I would go to church. There were bells ringing tangledly through the clear air while I bathed and shaved carefully and put on a blue suit. I walked vaguely in the direction where I remembered having seen a small Anglican church, and found myself there in less than ten minutes. Little girls with curled hair, dangling handbags, hung about their mothers; there was a strong smell of brilliantine in the group outside the church, and a strong smell of floor-wax inside. It was a cottagey-looking building and the priest was to match; he seemed embarrassed by the prayers he offered, and doubtful about the intercession of his blessing. He took as his text ‘Without me ye can do nothing’ and he advocated Christ as if he were suggesting a course of vitamin pills; the congregation listened politely. The whole service was very Low, and I decided that I would try the Cathedral in town, next time.

But at least when I came out I was prepared to accept the fact that this place in which I found myself was not the blue-grey Cotswold village, calm as a shadow, where, of my family, only my grandmother and I sometimes sat in church in the empty pew that had once belonged to our family; and I respected the flat statement of the sunlight, hitting everything full on, and the chipped façade of the corner Greek shop opposite the church, and the two Africans sitting with their feet in the gutter, drinking lemonade and carrying on a conversation that could have been heard three blocks away, and the pretty plump Jewish girls swinging down the road in their Sunday shorts, and the shoddy suburban houses, ready for the knockout of the demolition gang after only twenty or thirty years — respected the place for being itself.