Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

‘D’you remember Esperanto?’

‘It’s still going strong, I imagine.’

The hostess, now so delighted with her party that she was recklessly swallowing drinks at the pace she had imposed on her guests, said out of her stock of bold phrases: ‘It won’t be the whites who’ll decide what language is going to be spoken here it’ll be you fellows.’

The conversation became even freer and more confidential; cigarettes smouldered on the floor, someone stepped on someone else’s drink; the old phrases began to come up, in the old, frank, confessional tones: ‘The trouble with the whites is. . ’ ‘At least the Afrikaner says to you straight out, look here Kaffir.’ ‘I’ve always wanted to know what Africans really think about mixed marriage.’ ‘And what’s the good of the Liberals opening party membership to us Africans if we haven’t got votes?’ ‘How do you really feel. .’ ‘What do you honestly think. .’ The young coloured was railing against coloureds who wouldn’t identify themselves with the Africans and Indians. Sam was saying urgently: ‘Don’t you believe there isn’t still time. Don’t you believe it.’

‘For God’s sake,’ said Steven, accepting another brandy, ‘must we always talk about it?’ ‘By all means,’ said the pretty girl, spreading out her hands as if to draw the company closer, ‘Let’s talk about anything you like. Hundreds of things I always want to talk about.’ ‘You see,’ Peter suddenly contributed, giggling, ‘we always think you want to talk about it.’

‘And we always think you want to!’ said the lecturer.

‘There it sits,’ said Sam excitedly, ‘the uninvited guest, wherever you go — ’

‘Hey, we should write a song about that,’ the host looked in proudly upon the conversation.

‘Can’t we talk about something else?’

The hostess looked at us all, fondly. There were almost tears in her eyes. She felt so released, accepted, that she said, arch and wordly, to Sam and Steven: ‘I’m going to see if our black brothers in the kitchen can’t rustle up some tinned soup for us.’

The female member of the university couple had appeared on the arm of my chair: ‘May I perch next to you?’ and when I had persuaded her to take the chair instead, I turned back to the company just as the newspaperman’s pretty girl was asking, ‘Cigarette, anybody? Has anyone got a cigarette for me?’ Mine were finished. So were the university lecturer’s. While we fumbled, the girl sat forward, expectantly, her lovely grey eyes exaggerating her need, in response to the audience. I suppose if a woman is beautiful and greatly appealing, it is almost impossible for her not to use the virtuosity of her charm, sometimes simply for the careless pleasure of using it, as an acrobat might turn a masterly somersault at home on his own lawn, or a peacock shake out his splendid tail when there was no hen about to be impressed. She was dressed up — as it were — in the look of a woman cajoling a favour from a lover; there it was, that look she could do so easily, in a minute, anywhere.

Sam said, ‘Here, Steven, you’ve got some cigarettes —’ And Steven raised his eyebrows in inquiry, already twisting in his chair to get at his pocket. ‘Sure thing, somewhere here.’ He found the paper pack, and talking, dividing his attention, opened the torn top; there was one cigarette in it. The girl, following what he was saying, held out her hand in a charming mock supplication and relief. And then I saw, quite distinctly, an exact moment, between one word and the next, when Steven’s mind cut out from what he was saying — he saw the girl, saw the feathers of her charm all spread out in complacent display — and then cut back to the sound of his own voice again. He went on talking without a pause, and while he did so, he carefully took the single cigarette out of the crumpled pack, tapped it on the table to settle the tobacco, and put it in his mouth. Peter, the lecturer, Sam, the lecturer’s wife, myself, and the girl with her hand still held out before her, watched his hand go out to the cigarette lighter on the table, pick it up, and light the cigarette, pinching in his nostrils with the first draw.

No one said, ‘Hey, what’s the idea? What about that cigarette?’ No one laughed. No one acknowledged, made of the incident a moment’s absentmindedness on the part of a man who had had rather a lot to drink. We exempted him, and so gave away what he and all black men must always suspect of the company of white men: he was not like us, after all; after all, he was black.

The girl’s hand came slowly back to her; she covered it with her other one, in her lap. And she too, went on talking, smiling, asking questions with an air of intense interest, confessing her own opinions self-critically and with laughter. A little later, when I had drifted into another group and out again, I heard her say, detaining the host with a dove-like inclination of her head, ‘Sweetie, do you think you’ve got a filter tip in the house for me?’

At this time, I didn’t really want to go and see Anna Louw. Once I was in her company, I was always glad of it, and couldn’t understand my reluctance; yet no sooner was I away again than I was conscious of a childish relief, and an impatience to get back to my preoccupation with other people.

I was a bit ashamed that it seemed to work out that the times when I sought her out coincided with the times when I couldn’t be with Cecil, or when Steven had gone to ground on one of his enthusiastic mysteries, which, these days, were likely to be involved with Lucky Chaputra. In the first few minutes, I always felt that I had a left-out air about me that was unmistakable to Anna; my ring of phrase had echoes of the people with whom I had been spending most of my time, my manner carried still the impression of theirs.

I drove out to see her one afternoon after I had left the office; she was in the tiny part of the garden which was considered hers, and while she dug a thin little Indian girl flitted about her, calling out in a soft twanging voice nasal as a mosquito’s. I heard them across the garden, before they saw me; peaceful sounds, the singing whine of the child and the slow, reasonable answers of the woman, monosyllabic but somehow satisfying in sound, as Anna’s Afrikaans accent tended to make them. I had encountered the child there before, several times — ‘She’s Hassim’s little sister,’ Anna had told me. Hassim was Anna’s divorced husband, whom I had never met, and whom I don’t think she ever saw.

The child ran away into the house when she saw me coming, but slowly, as a background to the talk between Anna and me, I was aware of her approaching, step by step, hanging back and yet coming on. I called ‘Hullo, Urmila!’ but she was behind a bush; and only when I turned my attention back to Anna, and forgot about the child, did she take up her game where she had been interrupted.

I had thought I should have to make some excuses for not having come before (the real excuses were the only plausible ones, but though they might tacitly be accepted, they must not be spoken aloud) but, as always, I had forgotten that if Anna spoke little, she was also the easiest person in the world to talk to. All she said was,’ How’re you getting on, Toby?’ and I lay down on the grass while she went on pressing down the soil round the seedlings she was planting, and I told her about the incident of Steven and the cigarette. That was how it was, in her company. I’d wonder what on earth I’d find to say, and then something I didn’t even know I’d been brooding about would come out of my mouth as simply as a remark about the weather.

She threw no new light upon the incident. ‘He’s an odd customer,’ she said mildly, when I had finished. Yet the very matter-of-factness of her acceptance had the effect of bringing the incident into perspective; a perspective, I realized with surprise, that was not mine. It was the perspective of the frontier, the black-and-white society between white and black, and I was only a visitor there, however much I had made myself at home. Anna was a real frontiersman who had left the known world behind and set up her camp in the wilderness; the skirmishes of that new place were part of the condition of life, for her.