Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

I drove out to Sam’s house and found no one there; not even the crones in the yard could tell me where he and his wife might be. I drove back again, through the flare and dark of the night-time township, cries like streamers, smoke and the smells of food, drunken men, children, and chickens, the tsotsis hanging around the cinema — and I had to keep drumming it into myself, he is not there, he is not there. He was made up of all this; if it existed, how could he not? I had to keep explaining death to myself over and over again, as I met with each fresh piece of evidence against its possibility. Despite the war, despite the death of my father, I had never proved the fact of death in my own experience; since I was a man, I had never lost anything that meant more to me than a pet; I understood death only as a child, who has been told the facts of life, thinks he understands love.

In the city, the white powdered faces of women above fur coats showed under the neon lights of the cinemas and theatres, immigrant youth from Naples and Rome stood about on their thick-soled shoes before an espresso bar, the cars urged slowly round and round the streets, looking for parking-places. I drove slowly through the city, slowly through the suburb that climbed the hill.

In the flat, there were the guinea-fowl, the smell of wood-smoke and the feathers, floating along the floor in a current of air stirred by the opening door. The sight of the place was like a confrontation with the smiling face of someone who did not know that anything had happened. The amputation of pain severed me from the moment when I had shut the door behind me, not by eight hours, but by the timeless extension of experience; I had moved so far from that moment, that I felt stupidly unable to understand that, relatively, time had stood still, in my flat.

I knew I could not stay there. I closed the door and went back down the stairs and sat in my car. A hideous sense of aimlessness took hold of me; I sat like a man in an empty, darkened theatre, watching the scene coming down, being taken apart, and carted away. Where were the walls of stone, houses that would stand, a place of worship where you would find God? What had I known of Steven, a stranger, living and dying a life I could at best only observe; my brother. A meaningless life, without hope, without dignity, the life of the spiritual eunuch, fixed by the white man, a life of which he had made, with a flick of the wrist, the only possible thing — a gesture. A gesture. I had recognized it, across a world and a lifetime of friends and faces more comprehensible to me. How could it be true, that which both of us knew — that he was me, and I was him? He was in the bond of his skin, and I was free; the world was open to me and closed to him; how could I recognize my situation in his?

He had not come into his own; and what I believed should have been my own was destroyed before I was born heir to it.

At last I went upstairs again and wrapped up the guinea-fowl in newspaper and took them to Cecil. Sam was out; I could not telephone, across the breach of the town between white man and black, to find out if he was home yet. I couldn’t go to Anna Louw; it seemed to me that it would have been, in some curious way, a disloyalty to Steven to do so. I went to Cecil, with whom I could not discuss Steven’s death at all. Not to talk of it, to ignore pity or moralizing about the short, violent life — that seemed the only thing. For with Steven it was not that he was this or was that; simply, he was.

I drove to Cecil’s flat and found she was, as usual, in the bath. She spent so much of her time lying, smoking, in the bath. She called to me ‘I’ll be out in a minute,’ and I went to the kitchen with my burden of birds. Eveline was washing up the dinner things; ‘Master Toby!’ the woman giggled.

‘Where are we going to put them, we got the fridge full with those things already! Master Patterson he brought us six.’ And she showed me. But I left them to her and went away to the living-room and got myself a drink. In a little while, Cecil came in wearing a dressing-gown, the ends of her hair damp with bathwater. ‘Those birds are marvellous! You’re an angel! They’ll be fantastic eating.’

‘Eveline says you’ve got more than you need, already.’

She looked embarrassed, but careless of being found out in social lies, at once said,’ Oh Guy Patterson brought them. Some nonsense. He begged a stocking of mine to keep his head warm and promised me birds in exchange. How was the trip?’

‘Fine. What sort of weekend did you have?’

‘You do need a haircut. Look at this frill on your collar. You look dead-beat.’ She came and sat beside me and took my hand in her warm lap. I felt under my hand the cold body of the dog and took my hand away and put it behind her head and kissed her hard. She was pleased as she always was by the rough and unexpected advance, and she laughed and said, ‘Don’t tell me you’ve come back from the bush all randy,’ with the faintest emphasis on the ‘you’ that might have implied an unspoken ‘you too’; it crossed my mind that perhaps she was thinking of Patterson. Yet I turned to her and I kissed her and passion came like a miracle in my numbness, and there was compassion in the love-making. I caught her looking at me, as, in her untidy bedroom with the neck of the bedside lamp twisted to throw its light away from her, on to the wall, we went through the ancient ritual of oneness; gazing back at her paused face, I too, was sorry I had not done more for her, wanted or been able to take her in and make life real for her. Yet, in the end, she seemed to hold back on the brink of her own pleasure; she let me go ahead and then she lay back, her eyes open, smiling at herself in some private justification. I said to her, ‘What’s the matter?’ But she shook her head and still smiling, touched my hair, that she had complained about earlier, with a queer little gesture of finality and tenderness, as a woman might adjust her husband’s tie before they are to go out.

She said, softly, ‘It’ll soon be time for you to go back to England, won’t it. Perhaps I shall come and see you there.’

‘Are you really coming?’

She closed her eyes and drew her nostrils in, a child making a wish, ‘I shall marry a rich man and have a suite at the Dorchester and come and see you.’

I said, ‘Oh, I see.’

Later, she led me to make love to her again, and in the dark I thought triumphantly, desperately: I am alive. Yes, one of us is still alive.

Steven had died like a criminal, but he was buried like a king. All the hangers-on, the admirers, the friends, and acquaintances of his gregarious life came, as one of them expressed it to me, to see him off. There was a band in the funeral procession, there was Betty Ntolo and a whole parade of other entertainers, there were orations in three languages, there were wreaths three feet high. And he was not a film star, or a politician, or anyone known at the distance of fame; all these people had known him as one of themselves.

Sam, when he saw me, held my arm and wept; but I could not cry, just as, in the midst of the joy of jazz at one of Steven’s parties, I could not dance. We went home to Sam’s house and sat drinking the tea that his wife Ella served us in silence. Later he and I walked to the top of the ash-heap that made a promontory near their house. Spring was coming; even up there, a stripling peach-tree that had found a hold of soil under the ash put out a few fragments of thin, brilliant leaf. Beneath us, the township smoked as if it had just been pillaged and destroyed. ‘I’ve sold my car,’ he said. ‘That’s where I was on Tuesday when you came. I’d promised to deliver it.’