Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

‘. . dust and stones, and a fly-bitten hotel with a couple of shiny cars. . ’ — Anna’s was the Neksburg Kit Baxter had talked about months ago, that first day at the Alexanders’.

‘Right opposite our tea-room there are five pepper trees.’ Anna was picking her way among the significant things of a child’s life. ‘I remember beginning to look at those pepper trees. You know how, to a certain stage, you don’t really look at things? Well, up till then, the pepper trees had been the same as the tea-room and the yard and the house. — I forgot to tell you that on the walls of the tea-room, we had coloured photographs of the members of the family, particularly the children. We went to Bloemfontein specially to have them taken; I mean, if a baby was born, it was taken on its first birthday, and so on. There was a picture of me and my two younger brothers on the wall just above the paraffin refrigerator. I used to look at it for hours, in fact I looked at it every time I walked into the shop, because I believed that that must be the way I really looked, not the way I was when I saw myself in the mirror. In the picture my lips were bright red and my hair had touches of yellow. There was a big picture of my cousin Johannes’s fiancée, with a rose in her long yellow curls — she really did have them — and her hand raised to her neck to show the ring on her finger. And there was an even bigger one of another little cousin, the beauty of the family, and my age, with a mauve crinoline. Well, I don’t remember when exactly it was, how old I was, but I distinctly remember a clear division of time when I suddenly knew for sure that the pepper trees, always outside there, always to be seen, were one thing, and our tee-kamer, with the smirking photographs that didn’t look like us, and the mirrors with the holders filled with dust-covered crinkle paper flowers, and the radiogram that shook when it sang, were another. It was in the season when the pepper trees were — in fruit, would you call it? — when the little pink beads were ripe, and mixed up with the pale greyish leaves, so that the trees looked soft. From then on, whenever I came back from school for the holidays, I found that the things I didn’t mind about Neksburg were the things my brothers and cousins were impatient and ashamed of, and the things they admired and welcomed were the things I was ashamed of. More than anything, I was ashamed of the coloured photographs. I cried over them, once, down in the culvert where the stream was, near the cemetery. They were ashamed when they saw someone carrying a goat tied on his back while he rode a bicycle.’

I would never have guessed that Anna’s revolt should have begun as a revolt of taste. I asked her when she had begun to be interested in politics.

‘When I was working in Bloemfontein and then Johannesburg. You see, my family didn’t think it anything unusual for me to want to go to work in a city. They thought I wanted smart clothes and dances and plenty of boy friends. When I got myself articled to a lawyer, they didn’t take that too seriously. They let me go without a murmur. So long as I went to church on Sundays, that was all right.

‘You know, long after I was a member of the Party and a trade union official, my father knew nothing about any of it, he wouldn’t listen to anything about it. He was convinced that I had a nice office job in the big city, and that all I was waiting for was to come home holding hands with some nice Dirkie or Koosie, ready to hang a new picture of myself on the tee-kamer wall.’

‘And when did they finally find out?’

‘An uncle told them. There are Louws everywhere, all fifty-second cousins, and nosy as hell. I was running a union of coloured women, sweetworkers.’

‘What happened?’

She got up and refilled our glasses. When she was settled again, she said, ‘Oh, I got off quite lucky. They dropped me. They wanted to forget about me, quickly. I think they really did believe that I was crazy; they could be less ashamed of me, that way, it would then be something I couldn’t really help. My mother used to come and see me now and then, but I had never been very close to her. I would rather have seen my father; no chance of that, though. She’s dead. She died when I passed my final law exam, just before I married Hassim. The old man’s still in Neksburg. They’re strange people, really. There’s very little dignity left in them; they’re passionate Nationalists, of course, in the narrowest, most superannuated sense, they hate the English, they hate the blacks, they’re terrified of them all. In fact they hate and fear everything and everyone except themselves — what a miserable way to exist. And yet, d’you know, they’re directly descended from the Voortrekkers — one would expect them to have more guts. The Voortrekkers may have been bigotted, but they had guts.’

‘Well, you’re the answer,’ I said, ‘you’re the one who’s made the trek, this generation.’

She said, in her measured, downright manner, ‘In a way, I understand my family’s reluctance to own me, their own flesh and blood, reminding them of everything they’re afraid of. And have you ever noticed how dark I am? I’m like a blooming Spaniard. Huguenot blood, they say. Probably true, too, we’ve got La Valles and Dupreez on my mother’s side. But more likely some old boy’s flutter with a black girl in the old days, as well.’

We talked on past midnight. The child called out once, from the bedroom, and Anna went to her. In the few minutes she was gone, I became aware of the night outside, that suddenly blew up and flung itself in a squall of wind and scratching leaves, at the window. I went to the bathroom and saw there, as everywhere in the little house, the serene order of Anna’s mind; the tidy rows of toilet bottles, the fine soap, the clean thick towels.

When she came back to the living-room, a heavy, sparse fall of rain on the roof muted some remark she made, and I got up to go.

She stood, holding her arms in protection against some imagined chill from the sound of the rain. She looked very small and stocky, and tiredness, the burned-out animation of so much talk, marked deeply under her eyes. ‘Wait till this goes over,’ she said. We both had had quite a lot to drink, and a mood of confidential timelessness had settled around us, intensified by the rain, which, too, took a shift in rhythm and settled to a soft, steady, enclosing sound.

She told me about the visit to Russia in 1950 that had disillusioned her once and for all about Communism, and after which she had broken with the Party in revulsion. Unlike most ex-Communists I knew in London, Anna had not remained in that state of spiritual convalescence which was as far as they seemed able to recover from loss of faith — but she shared with those who would never be able to put themselves together again, a dogmatism of manner, as old military men never again walk quite like other men. Although she no longer had to believe unquestioningly, she could not shed the air of being always right.

Still later, she said, suddenly, ‘When you go to Neksburg you must go and see the lion.’

We had been talking about Faunce and my father, but the remark did not seem irrelevant. After a moment, I said, ‘Probably I won’t go at all.’

She sat back, buried in the big chair and looked at me steadily, with the smiling concentration of vision slowed by brandy, as if she were a star whose light took a million years to reach me. ‘D’you like those people?’ she asked. There was genuine curiosity, not implied criticism, in the question.

‘Some of them.’

She nodded in agreement. ‘The one in the Stratford Bar. She’s lovely-looking.’

I said,’ None of the people I know here seem to know each other.’