Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

Often, in the letters written to me from England, I would come across the phrase ‘the life out there’: the people I knew read of strikes, of beer-hall riots, and arrests for treason, they saw pictures of smiling black babies dressed in beads, of tall buildings, of politicians whose defiantly open mouths might be prophesying doom or development. Out of all that, I suppose they rounded off some sort of sphere to contain me, vague to them but of course certain to be perfectly clear to me.

They would have understood a city of many different ways of life, all intermingled, but would they have understood the awful triumphant separateness of the place I was living in? Could I tell them how pleasant it was to be lulled and indulged at The High House? Could I explain the freedom I felt where I had no legal right to be, in that place of segregation, a location? I supposed that to have a ‘life out there’, a real life in Johannesburg, you’d have to belong in one or the other, for keeps. You couldn’t really reconcile one with the other, the way people were, the way the laws were, and make a whole. The only way to do that was to do what Anna Louw had done — make for the frontier between the two, that hard and lonely place as yet sparsely populated.

In any case, I had no particular wish to explain myself, or the irreconcilables of the way I was living, to anybody, even myself. All my life I had lived among people who found it necessary to explain. If they hadn’t given me any tradition but doubt and self-examination, then I had chosen to prefer to trust to instinct. In Johannesburg, at least, it had proved a fairly lively way to live.

Steven’s gusto renewed itself as naturally as the sun rose every morning. Living by his wits kept them skinning-sharp; his whole life was an endless outwitting of authority. Sometimes he was a child playing cops and robbers; sometimes he was a lawyer cunningly, constantly, watchful for loopholes in a case that built up more formidably every day. He would slip into my office with his well-brushed suède shoes and his well-cut suit hanging fashionably loose, looking down his nose as he smiled, the way he had seen filmstars do.

‘Well, who’ve you been talking into something now?’

Suddenly he’d sit down opposite me, throwing aside the pose, grinning his battered, broken-toothed grin.

‘The trouble with you, Toby’ — ‘the trouble with you’ was one of Steven’s favourite openings — ‘is that you’ve lost faith in the power of the human voice. You only believe things when you see them written down. It’s much better not to have things on paper, for other people to keep after they’ve gone out of your head.’

‘No simple wisdom this morning please.’

‘Don’t worry, man, I’m off. You remember that fellow from Tzaneen, Bobby, the short one?’

‘I don’t, but that doesn’t matter; what about him?’

‘He’s a good guy. He’s got a job with old Jake, in the printing shop, but he hasn’t got a permit to work in Jo’burg. I’m gonna fix it for him now.’

He knew a fellow. This time a fellow who was a clerk in the immigration office. But always a fellow somewhere; a fellow who laid bets on horses for him; a fellow who bought brandy for him; a fellow who got him an exemption pass, so that he didn’t have to carry a wallet-full of identity papers and tax receipts about with him. The more restrictions grew up around him and his kind — and there seemed to be fresh ones every month — the quicker he found a way round them. Much of his vitality and resource and time went into this; sometimes I wondered how long one could keep up this sort of thing — how would he live as he grew older? — but mostly I enjoyed the flair with which he did it. Nothing could keep Steven out. In the locations often there was the charged atmosphere, smouldering, smothered, and sour, like the porridge turning to beer in the pots, of a vast energy turned in upon itself. But he wriggled and cheated and broke through.

At least once a week he would drag me off on some fantastic jaunt, or suddenly bring me into the company of new people, all apparently old friends of his. We went to Lucky Chaputra’s splendid wedding, in February, and to a conference of witch-doctors — pompous, prosperous men in blue suits with well-rounded waistcoats. He arranged a special performance of Indian dancing for me, and didn’t tell me about it until we were at the door of the house in Vrededorp where the girl I’d seen before was waiting for us; then he laughed and swaggered and made boastful light of the surprise. ‘You’re really impressed with that baby, I think, Toby,’ he murmured, looking at me sideways. He would have pimped for me, but he was never in the least dependent on me for anything; that first night in the shebeen when we were drunk together he had got the moment he wanted from me; he didn’t want anything else, or less.

Often I thought how well he and Cecil would have got on together, if they could have known each other. Their flaring enthusiasms, their unchannelled energy, their obstinately passionate aimlessness — each would have matched, out-topped the other.

William cleaned the floor around Cecil’s feet unnoticed; the New Year went on as unremarkably as William’s return to working anonymity; he had disappeared for three days, the day the turn of the hill hid him, but once he was back everything was as before. Cecil was going to ride Hamish’s prize mare in the big Show that is held in Johannesburg at Easter, and the muscles of her forearms were quite steely with the determination of her training. She went off to Kit Baxter at the Karroo farm for a week, and when I went to Hamish’s for a swim, on the Saturday morning, I found that old John Hamilton had fetched the little boy Keith and coy Eveline, the nanny, from the flat, and was giving the child a swimming lesson. I felt guilty because I hadn’t thought to do it; I might have taken the boy to the zoo, or something, while Cecil was away, but really, she did so little for him that there was nothing much to compensate him for in his mother’s absence. He turned and frowned away from the glare of the water, and, in the moment, he was terribly like her. Suddenly I wished her back, very strongly; I was aware not of her laughing, talking, active social presence, but of her silent, sentient self that was inarticulate — her hand, smelling of cigarette smoke, early in the morning, the exact displacement of her weight as she flopped into the car beside me.

I continued to think about all this while John and I lay in the sun — an amber sun, with all the white heat turned to the other side of the world — and he talked with his usual ease and lack of demand.

‘You’ve got to come along with me. We can’t have you going off back to England one of these days without having seen the best guinea-fowl shooting in the country. Man, you’ll love it. A couple of gallons of red wine, plenty to eat, and you walk twenty miles or so a day. You feel great, I can tell you. No trouble, no dirty work — I always see we have good boys to keep the camp going, and clean the birds and all that. I wouldn’t take you on the first shoot, though, if there hasn’t been a good ground frost yet it’s the very devil, you get yourself covered in ticks. Then, if you go too late, say August, there’s too much grass down, no cover for the birds and they’re off, the moment you sight them. You haven’t a snowball’s to get anywhere near. God, that’s maddening! You know what I mean, Toby?’

I answered with the appropriate, laconic show of response which is simply a series of polite noises hiding inattention, and that, I have to admit since living out of England, is done particularly and inoffensively well by Englishmen. Foreigners attribute the manner to that other famous English trait, a predilection for understatement, and so save themselves the implication of boredom. In any case, I was not bored by John Hamilton; I simply wasn’t listening to him.