Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

I rolled on to my back and watched the leaves run together in the magnetism of gathering darkness. Anna went on methodically, digging and planting, making little grunting sighs of effort as she moved round the bed of earth. She had the absorption in her activity of people who are used to doing things alone. For a moment, I had the feeling of not being there; I was aware, as one seldom is in the company of another, of her being, in depth, beyond the surface at which her life had touched upon mine. I asked her, suddenly:

‘What made you marry Hassim Bhayat?’

She shuffled round — she was sitting on her haunches — and picked up a seedling held in its little fist of earth. It was an inquiring gesture.

‘Was it because he was an Indian?’

She was still holding up the seedling, and though her back was to the fading light, and I could not see her face clearly, I sensed her following my face. She said, ‘I was in love with him. But what’s the good of saying, I would have loved him whatever he’d been. He was an Indian. That was part of what made him what he was. A woman who falls in love with a rich man will tell you she’d love him just as much if he was a lorry driver. Of course she wouldn’t. His money, the things he’s done with it and it’s done to him — they’re part of what he’s like and what she’s fallen in love with. Of course, that doesn’t mean to say she couldn’t fall in love, another time, with a lorry driver — ’ She turned away and put the plant into the place prepared for it.

‘You don’t think there was something of a gesture in it? Nothing like that?’

‘No,’ she said, with slow conviction. ‘But it’s terribly hard to keep a marriage like ours personal; it starts off like an ordinary marriage but then everything else, outside it, forces on it the onus of a test case. If you quarrel, you can’t simply be a man and wife who don’t get on, immediately you’re the proof that mixed marriages don’t work. You’ve no idea how this influences you, in time. You get terribly nervous; honestly. You begin to question yourself, all the time: do I disagree about this only because I’m white? Does this depress Hassim only because he’s an Indian, or would a white man feel the same — ’ The Indian child called out something, and Anna answered her. ‘It’s a good thing we didn’t have any children,’ she said. I didn’t answer, because I thought perhaps she was hardly aware that she had spoken. ‘It’s a good thing, after all.’ And now her voice broke through her thoughts, so to speak, ‘I used to say, it’s too bad if it’s hard for the children; you just have to make them understand that they’re only misfits in a worn-out society that doesn’t count, that, in reality, they’re the new people in the world that’s coming, the decent one where colour doesn’t matter. D’you think that’s true?’

‘I don’t see why not.’

She laughed.’ It’s not true yet . It’s a hell of a life to impose on a half-and-half child in the meantime; waiting for a kingdom of heaven that probably won’t come to earth in its lifetime. It’ll come. But it’s too big, too far off — you can’t measure an historical process against the life of a kid. That’s what I think now, anyway.’

‘It has to start somewhere, of course.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But not with a child of mine.’

I got up, and realized how damp with coming night the grass had become; my shirt was cold against my back. ‘Anna, I’m glad to find you’re a coward about something. You’ve always impressed me as being brave as a lion.’ She gave a little Afrikaans exclamation of derision, and laughed.

The Indian child had switched on all the lights in the cottage. From the darkening garden, warm light coloured by the objects on which it shone in the rooms, where all the curtains were open, seemed to swell up and fill the house’s shape like breath in a coloured balloon. We put the garden tools away together, and went up to the house. Anna, in a sudden mood of animation unusual for her, was telling me about the stuffed lion that stood in the hotel in the Karoo village where she had lived as a child. ‘Have you ever heard of the Cape Mountain lion? Well, it’s supposed to have been extinct since heaven knows when. This one was shot round about 1865, and somehow or other they’ve preserved it all this time. An Englishman killed it and sent it to England and had it stuffed, and it was in some club in London for years. When I was a kid, it was in the lounge of the old Neksburg hotel, right next to the cigarette machine. It doesn’t look much like a real lion, to me; more like one of those funny-looking beasts made in stone, what d’you call them — chimera, is it?’

‘Is it still there now? I think that’s the name of the place I’ve been invited to over Christmas — Neksburg, yes I’m sure.’

Anna gave a long, whistling exclamation: ‘Christmas in Neksburg, you don’t know what you’re in for!’ She seemed much amused.

‘Well, it’s not actually in Neksburg itself, it’s a stud farm belonging to some people I know, here — the Alexanders. People called Baxter run it for them, and there’s some idea about a house party — I don’t know if’t’ll come to anything.’

‘Ah, that’s a different sort of Neksburg,’ said Anna, smiling. ‘The Chamber of Mines Alexander? Very posh. It must be one of the thousand morgen efforts around there. Swimming pools and heaven knows what.’

‘But Neksburg is the village you come from?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t it odd? I have the feeling we’ve had this sort of conversation before.’

‘We have,’ she said. ‘You remember? The first time I met you. I mentioned that Jagersfontein Location case, and you said, Jagersfontein — my grandfather was killed at Jagersfontein!’

‘And we’ve never been to look for his grave,’ I said.

She waved her muddy hands in distaste. ‘Ach, it was probably my grandfather who killed him. Leave these old wars alone.’ She went off to the little bathroom to wash.

‘How much longer is that Jagersfontein case going to drag on, anyway,’ I called. ‘Amon was off again last Friday, it seems to have been going on for months.’

‘He was off when?’

‘Friday.’

‘The case was dropped a month ago.’

‘Grandmother tale, eh?’

Anna came in, hair tidied, inspecting her nails. ‘You fix him,’ she said, toughly. ‘Ah, how beautiful, Urmila! Toby, see what she’s done?’ The child had decorated the table with garlands of those brass-coloured dwarf marigolds that smell rank. I stayed to supper and smoked all through the meal to kill the weedy reek, since I knew not only Urmila but Anna would be offended if I removed my garland. After supper Urmila brought a book and stood, leaning on Anna’s chair, while Anna read her a chapter. The book was Peter Pan, and I wondered what Urmila made of even such an unconventional English nursery as the Darlings’. But I had the feeling, watching the child’s dark, ugly face, with the nervous lips along which her fingers wandered all the time, as if to read reassurance, and the dark eyes whose expressionlessness never altered, that it was not the story she listened to or wanted, but the fact of being read to. Anna put her to bed herself, and I heard the child murmuring and laughing to her.

When Anna came back into the room, she said, crossly, ‘They make the poor child so timid . I don’t know what she’ll be fit for — ’

‘A good Muslim wife,’ I suggested. ‘Maybe,’ said Anna. ‘Maybe,’ and sighed.

‘At least we were brought up to be able to look after ourselves,’ she said. ‘Didn’t always end up doing it the way the old people had imagined, but still. When I was her age I was at boarding-school in Bloemfontein, and I used to go there by train on my own.’ Sometimes she showed a sturdy, obstinate pride in the ways of the family she had, I gathered from what I knew of her, broken with irrevocably. We sat drinking brandy-and-soda and talked about her childhood. Her family owned a tea-room in the Karroo village of Neksburg, ‘ Tee-en-koffie-kamer, ’ she told me. ‘On the main road that runs through the dorp to Cape Town. It’s for tourists mainly, but since my uncle made it bigger in 1935, it’s also been a gathering-place for the local youngsters on Saturdays, and a place where natives come in to buy a bottle of milk, or bread, or cigarettes. Someone told me that the latest improvement is that natives are not allowed to come in at the front door of the shop. My cousin Toy — he’s running it now with one of my brothers — has another door, in the lane off the street, for natives. I haven’t been home since before I married Hassim, so I haven’t seen it for myself. We used to live behind the shop. There’s a yard, with an iron pergola which has rotted away in the grip of a big old grapevine — the iron’s embedded in the thick stem of the vine — and behind that’s our house. An old house, too, with thick stone walls, a flat roof, and shutters — at least it was, until they built a wooden veranda on to it, and painted the wood orange. My grandmother had tubs with ferns in them put in the yard; that’s where we used to play, with the children of our coloured servants, who were also supposed to look after us. The whole village is along that main street, the baker, the butcher, the two general stores, another café, run by a Greek, the estate agent’s, the lawyer’s, the old hotel and the new hotel, and, of course, an enormous garage. That went up about ten years ago. It’s the only modern building in Neksburg and it really hits you in the eye, all shiny, with a huge plate-glass window, and the chromium petrol pumps, and a couple of the local coloureds got up in blue uniforms. That and the travellers’ big cars outside the new hotel — they’re completely unlike anything else in Neksburg, but their out-of-placeness is part of the place — d’you know what I mean?’