Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

‘It’s William!’ said Cecil, with an hysterical laugh of relief, as if the identification of the man as the familiar servant who cleaned the flats on her floor automatically put an end to the horror.

But as she spoke, the man got up, his back to us, and began to pace back and forth across the road, and in his splendid chest the hideous panting began again, working up to a gasping climax, and ended in the raucous and frightful sobbing that left him crouching in the gutter with his head bowed on his hands. ‘William!’ Cecil called. ‘William!’ — the voice of authority and reproof that never failed to bring him to the kitchen door. We saw his face, looking directly at us as he began to pace and pant again; saw that he did not see us, or anything.

‘William! William!’

Cecil was shaking as if she had just been struck in the face. ‘What’s the matter with him?’ she begged me. ‘What’s wrong with him?’ She felt the threat of a disaster she had never heard of, the dread of the discovery of some human sorrow unknown to her, hidden as the New Year, something that was neither death, poverty, or divorce.

She thought of sorrow, I thought of madness. It seemed to me he must have gone crazy. I wanted to go out and try to talk to him, but she would not let me go without her, she flung on her clothes grimly and made me wait for her.’ You don’t want to go. You watch through the window.’ ‘No, no.’ Her hands could hardly put her clothing together.

She stood beside me on the pavement, looking down at the man, her one trembling hand with the nails scarlet against her temple, holding back her hair. We called his name, but the man did not know we were there. We clattered up the ringing iron of the back stairs to the roof, where the servants lived, and fetched one of the other flat boys. He was a small, bow-legged Basuto, who smoked a pipe as crooked as his legs. He stood looking at the man in the gutter, admiring his extremity. ‘He been smoking. Dagga make him like that.’

‘Speak to him, go on, speak to him,’ ordered Cecil angrily; she might have been telling him to scrub the floor.

The little man didn’t move. ‘I don’t touch him,’ he said. ‘He know nothing, nothing. Sometime three day he won’t know nothing.’ He enjoyed giving information.

‘Dagga! But he’s in agony!’ Cecil covered her face, up to the eyes, with both hands.

It was true that the man in the gutter knew nothing; could not seem to find his way back to himself. His was an unspeakable anguish of alienation, lostness, the howling of the wolf of the soul in a waste. The ghastly ritual went on: tearing anxiety of pacing and panting, climax of sobs, then panting again.

Cecil took her hands from her face, and I saw that the palm of one was indented with the marks of her teeth.

She went into the flat and made some strong black coffee. When I approached him with a cup he flung himself away like a wild beast for whom food, in the hand of a man, is overlaid with the scent of fear.

Cecil never took her eyes off him; when he panted, her hand flew to her breast, when he sobbed, her mouth twitched. ‘Should we send for the police?’

‘They’ll arrest him.’

‘Get a doctor?’

It did not seem possible that any human being could reach him, where he was.

‘Why did he do it?’ she kept saying.

A few Africans had wandered down from the building, drawn by the spectacle. They talked and pointed, standing back, the way they might at a zoo. ‘That’s his Christmas,’ said a tall man with speckless black-and-white shoes, a Stetson, and a happy way of chewing a match. Christmas. The word was echoed in agreement, indulgently. When they had seen the whole thing through two or three times, they went back up the stairs, or strolled off up the street talking in their own language and detaining each other with the sort of gestures described in the air that people use when they are capping each other’s anecdotes.

We went inside, too, and in the living room, which did not face on the street, you could not hear the man. But Cecil kept going to stand in the bathroom, where you could. She sat on the edge of the bath and shushed me as if she must hear what there was to hear; the tap dripped and the steam parted to liquid runnels on the tiles while the frenzied travail sounded on, bestial and wretchedly human at the same time, a monstrous serenade from some medieval hell. It was all the cries we do not cry, all the howls we do not howl, all the bloody furies in our hearts that are never, must never be, let loose. Even I was afraid, hearing it; not of the man, but of a stir of recognition in myself. We sat in a kind of shameful fascination, and did not look at each other. She was tight-lipped, her long hands were clenched on themselves, the spikes of both blood-red thumbnails folded back on the fists.

The sobs died; whistled away like a wind in a broken, empty place. There was a roaring cry that brought tears to attention in Cecil’s eyes, turned fiercely to me. Then the sound of a man running, running up the street, running away with the grit of the street powdering beneath his power. At the bathroom window, we saw him, past the leaning bicycle, past the stragglers, up the hill where the curve of the street lifted him behind the foreground of the Jacarandas.

It was a gentle evening, as it so often is after a grillingly hot day in Johannesburg. Scraps of pastel floated about the sky, between the buildings, the trees and the chimneys of the street. Cecil went into the kitchen to get some ice and there I found her, her head against the grey dish towels that hung on a nail.

‘Are you crying?’

‘No.’

‘What’s wrong?’

She turned and she still had the look she had had when she couldn’t stop listening to the dagga-crazy man. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do.’

‘How d’you mean? What about?’

‘This year.’ She stood in the kitchen as if it were a ruin. But the cheap alarum ticked and the engine of the refrigerator broke into a run; it was as I had always remembered it.

‘What do you want to do?’

She said, ‘What have I got to show? Twenty-nine. Not enough money to live decently. What on earth can I do with myself? The whole — thing — frittered away.’ She pushed the child’s tricycle aside with her foot, and began to run the hot tap over the ice-container. The cubes tumbled into the sink, and above the clatter she said savagely,’ Hamish’s is a terrible place, your whole life could go there, like one of the lunch parties.’

She began to talk of what she would do if she had money, if she didn’t have the child, if she lived in Europe. For the first time since I’d known her, I heard the South African accent come out in a phrase, in a word, beneath the carefully acquired upper-class English stereotype of her voice. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she would find the same parties, the same rich indulgent friends, the same thoroughbred horses, everywhere.

‘His Christmas!’ she said, suddenly. She was sitting on the divan beside me and I felt a convulsion move her body, like the shudder a dog gives before it is sick. ‘What other country is there where you’d have a thing like that on your doorstep? What a Christmas for anybody! Nothing but a beast! How can you live with savages around you!’

I said to her, ‘But you cried. You made coffee for him.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No. They said it was his Christmas. What would make anyone choose that Christmas?’ Like evidence, she began to gather up the presents, with their coloured and tinsel wrappings, their ribbons and sprigs of holly and extravagantly affectionate cards, that we had brought from Alexanders’ and piled on the table when we came in.