Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

‘Ach, one doesn’t feel like it.’ Elias Shomang was not a shebeen frequenter.

It was still raining hard, and I lent Steven my greatcoat; it was too short for him, and shabbier than anything he would have owned, but he seemed pleased to wear it. ‘It’ll get spoiled in the rain,’ he protested, but he did not take it off.

‘You know damn well it couldn’t look any worse than it does already.’

‘Whatever you’ve left in the pockets is mine, eh, Toby.’

They all trooped out after him, and in the dark passage I couldn’t see him, I could only hear him call, about the coat, ‘I’ll bring it in to the office on Monday.’

‘Yes, yes. O.K. Anytime.’

When they had gone I felt tired and surlily pleased to be alone; all I wanted was to pour myself a brandy and get into bed and open the bundle of English papers I hadn’t been able to look at since they had arrived the day before. I had a surfeit of the unfamiliar and unexpected; even the names of places that belonged to a known and predictable way of life would have been a respite. But I had, instead, to go looking through the suitcase on top of the bathroom cupboard where I kept a few clothes I didn’t wear; for, the way plans one absently accedes to, thinking they will come to nothing anyway, suddenly materialize, the week-end in the bushveld with John Hamilton had caught up with me, and I was to be ready for him in the morning. He had told me what I must bring, but again, I hadn’t listened very attentively, and so I had to throw into an old duffle-bag what my imagination suggested, and what the resources of the suitcase of apparently useless clothing could supply. It seemed to me to be idiotic to be going off on this jaunt, anyway; I was irritated, as I tried to find the things I supposed I should need, that I had let myself be drawn into it. I hadn’t even remembered, when Steven had called back to me that he’d return my coat on Monday, that I wouldn’t be in the office on Monday. Not that that mattered; Steven was an African and would understand. Perhaps I should take on myself the blessed prerogative of Africans, and simply not turn up for the shoot; but Hamilton, blast him, wouldn’t understand, and was too likeable — in a curious way, too innocent a person — for one to be able to be rude to him. So I put in a couple of pairs of woollen socks, and a heavy pullover I had last worn at Zermatt, and a pair of brand-new khaki shorts I had bought in London for the outdoor life I had thought I was going to lead in South Africa, and went to bed, too tired to read and in an ugly mood. I didn’t sleep well, either, but kept waking myself like an uneasy animal that is on guard, even in its sleep.

At evening, the low horizon of bush ran together as the light left it, and seemed to sink over the edge of the world with the sun. And in the morning, it emerged again, a strangely even line of greyish trees, and, afar, was present all day. When we walked up to it, where it bordered the great mealie lands, it separated and thinned into growths of various characters; flat-topped, spreading trees, with mean and sparse foliage, waist- or shoulder-high bushes with short grass between them; low patches of briar; thickets of all three, trees, bush, and briar, through which not even the dog could crawl. And all these things were fanged with thorns. Everything that grew in this stunted forest had its particular weapon of thorn. The trees had long white spikes, clean and surgical-looking, like a doctor’s instrument, giving off a powdery glitter in the sun. Some of the bushes had the same kind of thorn, but others had shorter, thicker ones, more like those of a rose-bush, and some had thorns like fish hooks from which clothing, flesh or fur could not easily be released. The aloes with their thick fleshy leaves were spiked with red thorns. But worst and cruellest were the black, shiny quills, so sharp and smooth that they slid into your skin as quickly as a hypodermic needle, that covered the trailing briars, ankle-high. As you tore through them you heard them clawing at your boots, and no matter how careful you tried to be, every now and then one would stab into your ankle or calf. If it did not break off in your flesh as you pulled free, it would tear a bloody groove through the skin, as if reluctant to let you go without a taste of your blood. If it broke off, it would fester in your flesh, just beyond the grasp of fingernails or tweezers, until the inflammation it had set up around itself softened and swelled the skin enough for you to press it out.

Walking through this landscape, so thinly green, so hostile with thorn that the living growth seemed a thing of steel rather than sap, I thought of old religious pictures, with their wildernesses and their bleeding, attenuated saints. This was a Gothic landscape, where the formalized pattern of interwoven thorns that often borders such pictures, was real; where one could imagine a martyrdom symbolized by the brutality of these clutching, inanimate yet live instruments of malice.

In some places, where the bush had been cleared but the ground had not been ploughed for crops, fields of tall dead grass made a hissing noise as you pushed through it. Here and there, there was a break, and you would come upon a clearing where the low, thorn briars spread over the earth, and no one, man or beast, could walk there. Bristling branches which had no foliage to stir in the currents of the breeze and give them an air of life, maintained grim guard.

Grass like wood-shavings, pinkish as if permanently touched with the light of sunset. Khaki-weed, the growth of neglect and desolation, standing dead and high. The seed-burrs, round and sharp as porcupines, of some weed that had been cleared away, that crippled the dog the moment she set foot among them.

And more thorns, thorns in your hair and your hands, catching at your clothes, pulling you this way and that. And in silence. Silence on the fringes of which the soothing sotto voce of the doves, settling into the trees in some part of the bush which you never seemed to reach, was like the slowed heart-beat of the heat of the day. Now and then, the cheep, or the imagined cheep, of guinea-fowl. Where, where, where?

And a shot, from one of the others. And silence.

Out of the bush, on the borders of the mealie acres, a shot sounded differently. There, it rang right round the sky, as if the sky were finite. It was like a message, beaten upon the four vast doors of the world, North, South, East, West.

We didn’t get away early in the morning because when John Hamilton came to pick me up, not only did he still have some provisions to buy, but it was found that I didn’t have the right clothing for the trip. He raced me briskly round the town, in and out Army and Navy stores and various other shops, hustling me into long khaki pants that didn’t fit me (shorts, he said, were the one thing you could not be comfortable in in the bushveld), making me stamp up and down in bright yellow veldskoen, buckling me into anklets. In between, he collected the last urgent items on his list — salami and tinned soup, eggs, bread, matches, cigars, and lavatory paper. He did all this with the truant joy of a business man on holiday among the buildings and streets where usually he is to be seen hurrying from appointment to office. And there was a certain pleasure in going about the city on a grimly busy Friday morning, fitting oneself out in clod-hopper clothing from dark deep shops — whose existence behind gilded hotels and cinemas was unsuspected — stocked, it seemed, with props from an old Trader Horn film.

We met the rest of the party at someone’s house, and after scenes of confusion amid guns and yapping dogs and harassed servants, the great mound of stuff that was to be taken along was packed into and on top of a car and a station-wagon. Johannesburg dropped away and we were out on an open road where the winter morning lost its edge and the chromium rim of the car’s window, on which I was resting my arm, warmed in the current of the sun. Past Pretoria, the winter was gone entirely; there was a fine, fragrant warmth, like the breath from a baker’s shop.