Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

‘You are becoming rather elusive,’ said Steven. ‘I suppose it’s the car. This is Dick Chaputra, you’ve heard of him, of course.’

‘It’s time to forget it, if you have,’ the Indian said, looking pleased.

I wondered at the odd variety of things I was supposed to have heard of in Johannesburg. We shook hands and Chaputra immediately took a piece of the dried meat that people in South Africa call biltong out of his pocket and, having offered it round, began to eat it, looking pleased with himself all the time.

Chaputra took the chair I gave him, but Steven, as usual, preferred to wander about the office while we talked, inspecting everything with his amiable and inquiring gaze, and perching where he felt like it.’ Dick’s just been to India,’ he said, as if it were an unaccountable whim for anyone to have indulged.

‘How’d he like it?’

The Indian’s grin tightened on the thong of leathery meat, loosened another tidbit. ‘Awful,’ he said, with his mouth full. ‘Boy, I wouldn’t live there for anything. D’you know, in Bombay, you see hundreds of people sleeping in the streets? It’s a fact. That’s where they live, just sleeping outside in the streets every night.’

‘Worse than natives,’ said Steven, opening his mouth, curling his tongue back to probe the socket of a tooth, and widening his nostrils. He chuckled to himself.

The Indian spoke English with the typical South African accent and intonation; if I looked away from his plump dark face, his satin-bright eyes, the white teeth, and thick, fly-away black hair that gave him that combination of Orientalism and aggressively Western boyishness that many Indians outside of India seem to have, I might have been listening to the voice of any of the white South African youths who passed me in the street every day. I asked him how long ago his family had come from India.

‘My grandfather was born there,’ he said. ‘I never saw the old man. But I’m telling you, you can have India, for me.’

As we could not go out anywhere to lunch together, I thought I would have sandwiches sent up to the office. I went into the outer office to ask Miss McCann, who would be going out to lunch in a few minutes, to order them for me from the usual place.

‘Two ham and two cheese?’

This was what I had most days, when I did not go out. ‘No, of course that’s not enough. Mixed sandwiches, for three.’

She said nothing, and kept her eyes on the pencil in her hand, as if she were waiting for me to go. When I was back in the office, I remembered some personal letters for the post, and rang for her. We were talking, and I had forgotten what I had rung for, when she appeared. She stood in the open doorway and did not speak. I said, ‘Yes, Miss McCann?’ She said, after a moment, ‘You rang for me, Mr Hood.’ There seemed to me to be something ridiculous about our exchange; then I realized that it was because instead of coming into the room, she was standing in the doorway like that.

‘Oh yes,’ I said, remembering. ‘If you’d just put these in with the mail’ — and I held the letters out to her. She stood for a moment without moving, and in a flash I understood, and then said, motioning with the letters, ‘Here they are. ‘I stood holding them out to her like a lettuce offered to coax a rabbit, and slowly she came, looking not at me nor at anyone else. But as she took them, I stopped her. ‘Just a minute — this one’s to go airmail, and this, but ask about this one, perhaps it could go by ordinary mail, find out how long that would take — ’ And so I kept her for perhaps two minutes, in that room, unable to get out. Steven struck up an exaggeratedly careless and swaggering chatter, displaying familiarity with my ways, and, as Miss McCann took the letters and walked out, was saying, in a lordly, weary manner, ‘Where’s the beer hidden today Toby? — Toby always has a bottle or two tucked away somewhere — ’

The door closed finally and precisely behind her, first the handle rose, then the latch clicked into place. My heart was thumping and I was suddenly irritated with Steven, for behaving as badly as the girl. Yet, after all, his only alternative was the negative rudeness of ignoring her; I understood, now, that he dared not show the common politeness of greeting her, as any man might expect to say ‘Good afternoon’ to any woman.

It was true that I did have a couple of bottles of beer in the cupboard, which I kept there to drink when I had lunch in the office, on the principle, which even I didn’t believe, that it was a refreshing thing to do in summer. We drank it, tepid as it was, from some glasses I found put away unwashed in a cupboard (Amon was having one of his days off, to attend to the affair of his mother and Jagersfontein location) and, at last, the sandwiches came. The Indian looked all round the room, smiling, while he ate, and asked me direct, brisk questions about the business of Aden Parrot in South Africa, rather as if he had been called in to give an estimate of the firm’s assets. This was all done with the airy politeness of commercial habit; although he was probably a year or two older than I was, he even called me ‘sir’. When he left the room for a few minutes, the door had scarcely shut behind him when Steven said with the air of an impresario, ‘D’you know who he is? D’you remember that series of robberies in Hillbrow? You were here already, I’m sure you were. The big case where one of the witnesses disappeared? D’you remember? — Well, that’s his crowd. He’s Lucky Chaputra. That’s why he went off to India, to lie low. They didn’t have anything on him, but they knew the whole outfit was his. Couldn’t pin him down on a thing.’

‘What’s he busy with now?’ I said.

‘Resting,’ said Steven. ‘He’s got plenty of dough. Boy, if he were a white man he’d be a mining magnate or something. He’s cleverer than a cage of monkeys. He’s got a white man who plays for him on the stock exchange — yes, he’s made money like nobody’s business, out of gold shares. But he’s a restless boy, doesn’t know what to do with himself.’

Chaputra came back into the room again, chuckled, and said,’ Nobody saw me’ — he had slipped into the men’s room in the building, which was, of course, meant only for white men. He shook hands and thanked me in his gauche South African accent: ‘Gee, that was a nice lunch, man. Thanks, Mr Hood.’ I felt as if I had given a schoolboy a treat.

‘You should see his Cadillac,’ Steven waved his long arms in ecstasy. Then murmured to me as they went out:’ I know it’s not the car, with you, I suppose you’re busy with some woman. Well, that’s how it is with all of us at some time or other.’

‘I’m sorry about tonight, I should’ve liked to have seen the fight. What about next week. Are you doing anything Monday night?’

Immediately he lapsed into important vagueness, a device that, I had noticed before, he used to cover up the fact that for him, next week was too far off to have any reality. ‘Well, you see, I don’t know, I may have to go away on business for a few days. . ’

‘Business! What business have you to do outside Johannesburg?’

He made a graceful, swaggering exit, roaring with laughter that made the lie and the evasion inoffensive, and praised me out of all proportion for my mild perspicacity.

That afternoon, before she left the office for the day, Miss McCann, smelling strongly of lavender water from a fresh application, appeared in my office accompanied by a fair, red-faced young man to whom I had nodded once or twice before when he had come to see her. He could easily have been her brother, an earlier-born member of the family, who had got more than his fair share of the vigour which had given out before her conception, but as he walked in behind her, I realized what should have been obvious to me before: he was her young man. I thought they must have come to make an announcement of some sort — perhaps that they were getting married and put on a grin of suitable expectancy, which was met with a stony, puffed-up stare from the young man, and was not met at all by Miss McCann, who kept her eyes on the tray full of old pencils and empty ball pens before me.