Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

The darkness was cold. It came up around our legs and, as we stood around the fire, drinking the first whisky, the whole land became steeped in dark, while the sky took on the sheen of a wet shell. The shapes of the men changed clumsily as they put on pullovers and mufflers; I dragged out of the duffle-bag my souvenir of Zermatt. Meat had been brought from town for the first night’s meal, and John prepared and grilled it. Hughie opened a tin of beans and asked for bacon, butter, and various utensils John hadn’t got. ‘You should have one of those heavy iron pots, John, that’s the only way to do these things properly. Isn’t there a spoon with a long handle? Here! Find me a spoon, big one, one with long handle! — Jesus, this bloody thing’s burning me up.’ The unlikely-looking food was delicious, and with it we drank mugsful of red wine. We sat like spectators round the dance of the flames and the stars came out sharply and the dark seeped up and up. It was night, and in the great dark room of the world, we were a scene in somebody’s sleeping head, alight, alive, enclosed.

We sat drinking until late. Wine brought out an innocence, a schoolboy crudity, in Hughie. His swaying, bobbing face, smeared with the grease of chop-bones, hung above his mug in the licking light; he told old, long dirty jokes that one could listen to with the pleasant sense of recognition with which one follows the progression of a folk tale. He boasted about his dog; ‘If he was here and you touched me, like that — just touched me — he’d go for you. He’s not more than a year old yet, I reckon, but boy there’s nothing he’s not wise to. He never lets my kid out of his sight, I tell you, a Heinz fifty-seven varieties, and more sense than all your pedigrees.’

‘Poor old Grade, she enjoyed herself this afternoon.’

‘Well, give me pointers any day. I wanted to get a pointer, but then my kid wanted a pup and we bought this pooch. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if you couldn’t train him to be a gun-dog. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised. That dog’s so damned clever. And what a watchdog! You won’t see a kaffir pass our gate without crossing the road first.’

While Hughie discoursed on the superiority of pointers over setters, Patterson and I dragged an ant-eaten trunk four or five feet long, on to the fire, and as the flame delicately explored it, and the heat of the fire penetrated it, the life to which it was still host abandoned it in panic. First came long refugee-columns of ants, and hurrying woodlice; and then that creature out of the zodiac, a scorpion. Eilertsen suddenly got giggling drunk, like a woman, and kept pouring himself more wine with an air of recklessness. ‘First damn time I’ve got like this since V.E. day,’ he tittered. ‘Reckon it’s time I had a few again.’ Hughie went off on a long disquisition on the habits of stomach ulcers, which were the cause of Eilertsen’s long sobriety. Hughie knew so many half-truths and fallacies about so many things that the self-sufficiency of his ignorance was awesome; it was impossible to be bored by him. To people who prided themselves on their sensibility, he would seem to be a person completely without imagination, yet the truth of it was that he lived in a fantasy, was possessed by the new witchcraft, the new darkness of the mind made up out of the garbled misconceptions of scientific, technological, and psychological discoveries he did not understand.

Before he went off to bed, John called the servants to give them some wine. ‘Not too much, we don’t want them half-dead in the morning.’

‘Ach, give them brandy, man,’ said Hughie. ‘They don’t like wine. Give them each a tot of brandy. Kaffirs don’t really like wine.’

A little way from our hollowed-out interior in the dark, the three men sat round a small fire of their own. They had eaten; they talked so low among themselves that in our row-diness, we had not been aware of this anteroom. It was true, they were pleased with the brandy. Each stood, watching it being poured into his mug; on the face of the elder Nyasa, Tanwell, a smile, sudden and soft as the flame that lit it, showed incongruously on the fierce squat blackness of his closed face. The Basuto clowned for his, while Hughie growled appreciatively and threatened to kick his backside. They went back to their fire with their consolation; it was plain that they didn’t enjoy this atavistic game of sleeping out. We had elaborate protective clothing, ground sheets, rubber mattresses, and sleeping bags, they had the blankets they slept in at home in the town. There was the unexpressed suggestion that they were naturally closer to nature, to put them back in the veld was like loosing wild things. But the Nyasas were close enough to a state of nature to know that, for man, the state of nature is the nest; the musky closeness there must be in the grass and mud huts of the tribe. The Basuto was a bleary-faced town-sharp man of about my age; I supposed that he would rather be gone to ground in Alexandra township or the tin and hessian of Orlando shelters.

But in my blankets, dressed up for bed in all the clothing I could muster, I felt the comfort of the voices about me, the cosy, confident sound of voices that held no tone of doubt; voices for whom God was in his church, justice was in a court, and all the other questions of existence had equally glib answers. The warmth of the wine in my body and the cold of the night on my cheek gave me that sudden, intense sense of my own existence that is all I have ever known of a state of grace; and that, exaltation of self that it is, must be the very antithesis of what such a state really is.

Patterson was pulling a woman’s stocking on to his head.

‘What’s that, a trophy?’

He grinned at me. ‘My dear boy, it’s the best way in the world to keep your head warm. But you’ve got plenty of hair.’

The others continued to stumble about the camp. ‘First damn time I’ve been drunk since V.E. Day, I’m telling you. . ’ Giggles. ‘Look out there, you silly bastard, you’ll have the whole thing over.’ ‘Here, girlie, good Grade, good girl.…’

I woke up to feel someone looking at me. It was the moon, staring straight down from a sky full of her great light without warmth, that weird contradiction of the associations of light. I pulled the blankets up over my head but I felt it, the eye that has no benison. The bundles of sleeping men were pale shrouds, the fire was silenced. Rolling out over the stillness there came a yowl from the entrails of desolation, the echo of a pack of nightmares. It stopped, and came again, and I did not think I heard it outside my own head. Suddenly, beside me, Eilertsen sat up whimpering in his blankets and fired three shots straight past my ear. The dead rose. ‘Good Christ, what’s the matter?’ ‘What the hell’s he doing.’ ‘I could see their red eyes in the dark,’ said Eilertsen, caught in the moonlight, ‘Just over there, in the bush.’ ‘Nonsense.’ When John was woken in the middle of the night he was not another self, like most people, but simply himself. ‘Jackal wouldn’t come that near.’ But after that, there was silence.

In the mornings, the birds were frozen stiff where we left them on the roofs of the cars, and the bottles of beer that John put out specially were opaque with cold. Patterson lay helplessly in his blankets, waiting for coffee to come, but Hughie, with his gingerish bristles sparkling on his chin and his hair fiercely tousled, stumped about in impatience.’ Let’s go out and murder the bastards!’

And with hands aching with the hard cold of the gun, we would follow him through a morning wet and fresh and strange as something torn from a womb. A rent caul of webs glistened on the thorns and the grasses swagged together in wet brushes. We heard guinea-fowl. We did not hear the doves or the starlings or the plover or the quail; only the guinea-fowl, like the words of a language one recognizes in a close murmur of foreign tongues. It seemed that they knew we were coming for them; there was the compulsion of an appointment between us; the birds were there and the men had come, and they must meet. When we rested in the camp, we heard them, were aware of them and felt strongly that they were aware of us. The flux and tension of the pursuit were completely absorbing, so that, in the heat of the day, when there was time to read, we did not read. The old fear, that had been bred into me, of finding myself with nothing to read (what would one do, caught somewhere, someday, without a book) was suddenly made harmless. I did not need to read. The books lay stuffed down in the duffle-bag.