Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

In the hall we sat on the floor on spring mattresses. ‘Indian-style,’ my neighbours kept telling me, with an air of novelty. ‘He sings in Hindustani and I only understand a bit of Gujerati,’ someone complained, while the band-leader, a wild, mournful-looking boy whom I would sooner have expected to see giving a performance supine on a bed of nails, sobbed and wailed, exactly like all those other young men who drive adolescents to an adoring frenzy. Presently a girl, with face and body of the most tender grace and beauty, came out to a slurring roar of appreciation. She wore a sari and there were bells round the ankles of her bare feet; the men called and hailed while she danced and rolled her eyes in a rhumba. ‘Lola, Lola, lovely my dear,’ Mia kept saying. And to me: ‘Those pigs can’t shut up. Isn’t she very good?’ I admired her and asked if she ever did any real Indian dancing. Immediately Mia and a number of others began a fervent conversation in which the word ‘classical’ kept recurring like the date of some great discovery, a battle recalled, or a noble name remembered. Classical, classical. After one or two more intervals in the anteroom, it began to go up like a call of despair, a cry in the wilderness — each one of them loved only classical, classical, what did Indians in this country know of classical? Poor sweating Jayasingh, pathetic as only a harassed fat man can be, became offended: his show, the best artists at the greatest expense, did not please. We all went out into the garden with him, like a deputation, and Mia, in an official tone (‘My dear, dear Mr Jayasingh. .’), and Steven and I with appreciative agreeing noises, tried to reassure him. I don’t think he was reassured, though perhaps he was mollified. A few minutes later, Mia had him in a corner again, while the show went on, and presently we were smuggled out of the hall during the performance of a band number, and, with Mia, Jayasingh, and one or two more, were closeted in the anteroom.

This time the Indian girl was there. I have never seen anything more beautiful. She had never been in India, and she spoke English with a strong South African accent, but she had an ancestral beauty, she had in flesh the round stone breasts and little round waist of women in Tenth Century Indian sculpture; I had once cut out a photograph of such an image, Vriksaka, the Tree Goddess. The live girl sat on an empty whisky-case, hardly touched by the thick yellow light of the smoking candle, hardly seen, and sang the way a bird sings on a telephone wire. People kept pushing into the room. Some were pushed out again. Those in the room talked admiringly, encouraged more than they listened, but I felt they really were moved by the idea of her singing. She sang traditional Indian songs as long as we wanted her to, which was as long as the important members dared keep her from the general audience, and then she went from among us, listening with attentiveness to the long compliments, slipping inoffensively from the pawings of those who would detain her, ducking her head swiftly beneath the hands, faces, the despairing, longing cries: ‘Classical. . classical. . ’ She was made to please: I had not seen a creature like her before.

Driving back to town, I talked about her to Steven, and soon we slipped from the particular to women in general, and then, inevitably, to the particular again, while Steven told me of his conquests in London. It was an old subject, one we’d come to time and again in the confidential small hours in the townships. It seemed to be a point of honour for a black man who’d made something of himself to boast of how, in his small beginnings as waiter, bell-boy, or some such conveniently-placed menial, he had been coveted by a white woman. Some of the stories rang true, and some of them didn’t. But everybody had one to tell. I suppose that in the country I was living in, in the city I was living in, such tales were sensational, anarchic, and meant far more; but I must say that to me, as a stranger and an outsider, they were simply part of the old sex myth I have mentioned before — the wistful projection of joy not to be had at home.

We finished up the night at the House of Fame, where Steven was no longer living, but of which he was still master of ceremonies. In the township, singing people, arm-in-arm, filled the streets. The girls, yelling and shaking as they careered along, wore paper dough-boy hats inscribed ‘Hiya Babe’ or ‘I’m No Angel’. The dingy houses, where old people tried to sleep and the smallest children were in bed, showed no life. But there must have been some, like the House of Fame, where people made their own music and danced and talked. From the hidden yards came voices with the particular, chanting quality of beer-drink frenzy. The shebeens were open for a roaring trade — we went into one to look for a friend of Steven’s — and there were more police about than I had known before. ‘A lot of broken heads and stabbings before Christmas is over,’ said Steven, grinning and shaking his head. ‘The Prince of Peace seems to skip us.’

On Christmas Day I went to church with Sam’s wife, Ella, and their little girl. The child was dressed in a stiff frilly frock and she wore the gilt locket I had brought as a Christmas present for her. We went to the Anglican church in the location where they had their house, and only Ella accepted my going as an ordinary thing to do; Sam was delighted that I should want to go with Ella, but in the manner of someone who approves a piece of intrepid sight-seeing.

I was glad to be with a friend, instead of among the polite strangers who filled their cosy church near my flat with an incense of brilliantine. In this church in the township the priest was a tubby, untidy Englishman, tonsured by baldness. The church was built of ugly, purplish brick and smelled of the soap with which the congregants had washed, and of the smoke with which their clothing was impregnated from their cooking fires. A choir of small boys and another of women sang with the unearthly voices of Africans: voices that seem to have a register of their own. After one look round at me, the congregants accepted my presence with scarcely a whispered conversation, though I don’t think it likely that a white layman had ever been in their church before. After the service I saw that the priest wanted to come up and speak to me, but I pretended not to see, and we left quickly. I don’t suppose any church will ever suit me so well as our church at home, where once my grandfathers gathered their families about them in their own pew; so much for me, as a worshipper.

Christmas dinner was at Sam’s. There was a chicken and everyone who was invited brought something for the table — there was a tinned pudding, a cream-cake, some sausages, nuts, and sweets. It was more like a picnic than anything else, in spite of the stifling little room in which we were confined; the hot, bright day, everyone wandering about the room picking up what they pleased to eat, the pestering flies, the nearness of voices and raspberry squeakers blown in the street outside. I had brought bon-bons and a couple of bottles of wine, and, inevitably, Sam ended up at his piano. Everyone there fell into song as easily as other people drift into conversation; carols, traditional songs, and jazz hummed and thrummed and soared from them. As I drove away in the afternoon, I was stopped by police and told to report to the charge office because I had no permit to be in the location; I was lucky — it was the first time I had been caught, and I had been in the townships innumerable times without a permit.

I got home to the flat and found it nearly as hot as the crowded room I had just left, and, a little before six, I half-undressed, lay on my bed, and fell asleep. When I woke, it was not, as I thought, early evening, but morning. So it was that I seemed to go straight from the township to the High House; sleep was a blank moment that scarcely separated the rutted township track that I had learned to ride like a roller-coaster, from the smooth driveway — a tunnel of feathery green and flowers — where the car drew soundlessly toward the fountain of voices rising beside the Alexanders’ house.