Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

‘It was a gang, eh?’ someone said.

Steven nodded. ‘I should think he had it coming to him. It was a knife job, no chances. It must have happened about ten minutes before I came along, that’s all. They’d cleared off. People in the house there didn’t hear anything. When I saw he was finished, I just said, here you are, and skipped out as quick as I could.’ He was sitting down, now, and a glass of brandy dangled in his hands between his knees, in his characteristic fashion. He wrinkled his nose, not at the dead man, but at death. ‘A short life and a happy one,’ he said, and drank.

When I woke up in the morning in Sam’s house, I did have the strong, vivid feeling that life and death were breathing on me, hot and cold. No doubt in my own flat in a white suburb, or in the Alexanders’ house among the paddocks and the swimming pools and the Jacarandas, you were surrounded by living and dying, too. But there, you were not aware of it outside the personal aspects. In the townships, on a Saturday night, there was only an hour or two, between the late end of the long night and the early beginning of the day, when groans and laughter and fires were out. For the rest of the time, the whole cycle of living made a continuous and simultaneous assault on your senses. ‘There’s never a moment’s peace and quiet,’ Sam would say, standing in his little room with his old typewriter in his hands, as if in the space of those four thin walls there might be some corner of acoustical freak where he could put himself down and not hear the men shouting in the street, a procession of some sort, perhaps a school or a funeral parade, children quarrelling, a baby crying, a woman singing at a washtub, and the rusty bray and slam of the door of the communal lavatory in the yard as people trooped in and out of it. And in my flat, Steven would wander restlessly from the balcony to the living-room, saying, uneasily, ‘Man, I’m used to Sophiatown, there’s always something going on.’

I would walk with Sam in the early evening out on to the waste ground near his house. It was a promontory of ashes and clinker, picked bald, by urchins and the old, even of the rubbish that was dumped there, and it looked back over most of the township. At that time, the day seems to relent, even the dreariest things take on disguising qualities in the soft light. The ashheap took on the dignity of loneliness; we might have been standing on the crater of a burnt-out volcano, the substance beneath our feet gave no life to anything, animal or vegetable, it was a ghost of the fecund earth. Behind, and down below, everything teemed, rotted and flourished. There were no street-lights, and in the night that seemed to well up like dark water round the low, close confusion of shacks and houses — while, higher up, where we were, the day lingered in a pink mist — cooking fires showed like the flame of a match cupped in the hand. Sam said to me once, in the rather awkwardly jocular manner which he almost always used when speaking English, probably because it had been the way in which he first had managed to bridge the gaps of unease between himself and his first white acquaintances — ‘I suppose when you get back, this will seem like an ugly dream.’

But he was wrong, and it was hard for me to explain to him why, without having him attribute, on my part, too much to the romance of foreignness and poverty, the picturesque quality of other people’s dirt. He had his inner eye fixed quietly and steadily on his and his people’s destiny as decent bourgeois, his curse fell equally upon the roistering wretchedness of life in the townships, and his own childhood, when, as he described to me one evening up on that same ash-heap, he had herded tribal cattle in the Northern Transvaal. I sometimes thought, when I suddenly became aware of him through some expression on his face or something he said, how except when he was playing jazz, there was not one moment when his being was not quietly revolving on this purpose. His manner was a mixture of anxiousness and sad determination. He was full of dogged hope, a person whose life was pinned to a future. Just as Steven was hopeless, a person committed entirely to the present. Sam said of him, sadly: ‘Steven is just a white man in a black man’s skin, that’s the trouble’; which, taking into account the context of Sam’s affection and concern for Steven, was another way of saying what Anna Louw had said when she complained that Steven cared damn all for the African people. The only difference was, Anna saw Steven’s attitude as loss to his people, Sam saw it as a loss to Steven himself. Yet it was Steven who had some affection for the life down there, below the ash-heap, it was Steven who lived it as the reality of the present to which he was born — the only sure destiny any man has.

It was this aspect of township life, Steven’s aspect, if you like, that would make it impossible for me ever to look back upon it, from another country, as ‘an ugly dream’. It was no beauty, God knows, but it was no dream, either. It would not vanish from the mind’s eye; I should be able to believe in its existence even when I was somewhere else.

The first time I stepped out of Sam’s house on a Sunday morning, after spending the night there, the men and women stared at me, looked at me quizzically, and passed sniggering remarks — a white man who slept in the house of Africans was unheard-of, and under the greatest suspicion; a concupiscent grin informed the face of an old man, and he moved aside for me, saying’ Morning, baas’, for what could I have come for but sex?; and even when I was well known as an unexplained visitor at Sam’s house, and I took his little daughter by the hand down the road to buy her an orange from the row of vendors’ tin huts and home-made stalls and wares spread out on sacking on the ground, known as the ‘shops’, I was never anything but a stranger. But, as a stranger, I found in these places and among these people something I had never found at home. There were summer nights in Sophiatown, where Steven lived, when no one seemed to go to bed at all. The worse smells were made harmless by the warm, sour smell of beer. Urchins gambled under the street-lights that, spaced sparsely, attracted into their yellow light people as well as moths. There was singing and strolling; now and then one of the big American cars that the gangsters use would tear scrunching over the stones, down the street, setting long tongues of dust uncurling. The girls clicked in their throats with quick annoyance and screamed defiance in defence of their dirtied dresses. There was giggling and flirting. Some were primped and got up in high-heeled shoes, some were barefoot, dressed in a torn series of ragged garments, one overlaying the holes of another, and the last, inevitably, in spite of everything, worn through at the vital places, breasts and backside. On such a night, suddenly, a procession would burst round the corner, swaying, rocking, moving by a musical peristalsis: men and women and children, led by a saxophone and tin whistles, a rehearsal for a wedding due to take place next day. They sang and chanted, a sound to lift stones.

The life of the townships, at such moments, seemed to feed a side of my nature that had been starved; it did for me what Italy or Greece had done for other Englishmen, in other times. It did not change me; it released me and made me more myself.

‘You don’t have to worry about him, he won’t say anything,’ Cecil had said of her child, when he saw me walking down the passage of her flat in the early hours of the morning. She was more than half asleep, and her tongue was unguarded when she spoke. Whatever that casual truth implied, I found, after the first automatic twinge of jealousy, that it was powerless to affect me. I had another life, outside the parenthesis of the time I spent with her; she, too, had hers. Each tacitly forwent inquiry into that of the other, because each suspected that the discovery of his own life by the other would make the parenthetic shared relationship impossible. I heard her say, to some people with whom we were having coffee after a cinema, ‘Toby does a lot of work among the natives.’ Later, when we were alone, I asked her, ‘What made you tell the Howards that I do a lot of “work” among natives?’ ‘Well, don’t you?’ she said, yawning. ‘I never have,’ I said. She let it drop; she assumed that anyone who had anything to do with Africans was concerned with charity or uplift, and that was that — she wasn’t going to quibble over what she satisfied herself could only be a matter of definition. And I, I left it at that, too. I had had my little flirt with danger by questioning her at all; thankfully, I hadn’t had to take it any further.