Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

I knew how proud he was of the little Morris, how to him it was part of the modest stake in civilized living which it was so hard for Africans to acquire. ‘But why? What was wrong with it?’

‘My brother had to have some money. Ella’s got two sisters who want to go on at school. Oh, a dozen different reasons, all boiling down to the same thing — cash.’

‘That’s a damned shame.’

He smiled, to put me at ease. ‘Toby, man, the black skin’s not the thing. If you know anybody who wants to know what it’s like to be a black man, this is it. No matter how much you manage to do for yourself, it’s not enough. If you’ve got a decent job with decent money it can’t do you much good, because it’s got to spread so far. You’re always a rich man compared with your sister or your brother, or your wife’s cousins. You can’t ever get out of debt while there’s one member of the family who has to pay a fine or get sick and go to hospital. And so it goes on. If I get an increase, what’ll it help me? Someone’ll have to have it to pay tax or get a set of false teeth.’

‘Suppose you don’t?’

He shook his head at me, knowing better. ‘You can’t. You always know yourself what it’s like not to be able to finish school.’

‘Steven once said it wasn’t worth the effort to live as you and Ella do, to try and keep up some sort of standard against the odds.’

‘It’s always worth it, for me,’ said Sam, grinding the heel of his shoe into the ash. A group of children wandered up on to the ash heap; they seemed to belong there, as seals belong on rocks — the dusty skin, the bare backsides, the yellowed eyes, the animal shrillness of their wanderers’ voices. As we passed them, they called out at us. ‘They only know how to curse,’ Sam said, and turning on me in sorrow, shame, and anger, burst out, ‘The way that he died! A man like him! Running away in a car with a bunch of gangsters! D’you think if he’d been a white man that’s all there would have been for him?’

I began to spend a lot of time with Sam and his quiet wife. At first I felt awkward about going to their house so much more often than I used to when Steven was alive; but they accepted me in their shy, unremarking way as if this was inevitable for all of us. The life they led was very different from Steven’s; except for occasional jazz sessions, to which Sam did not take Ella, and to which she did not expect to go, they spent most of their time working; especially Ella — even when Sam played the piano or listened to gramophone records in the evening, she would sit in a corner, bent pain-stakingly over her books. She wanted to read for a Social Science degree, and was preparing herself, by following correspondence courses, for the time when she might be able to give up her teaching job and go to a university. She was pregnant again, but neither she nor Sam seemed to think that the care of a second child would push her hope of continuing her studies still further into the uncertain future.

At their house, I met a different sort of people from those I had become familiar with through Steven. An old Congress leader from another part of the country came to sit and listen while young doctors and lawyers criticized what Congress was doing; an elderly professor — educated in America in the days when such freedoms were at least possible for those who could afford them — spoke with the slightly soured, weary air of one who has heard everything, experienced every emotion of the speakers, many times before. These ageing men, sitting heavily on upright chairs, their legs planted apart, looked almost, already, the statues they might become one day, when the memory of what they had been was restored after the thrusting aside by the younger and more aggressive which was inevitable for them now. The old men kept the habitual gravity that the unsophisticated associate with wisdom. The young men had the swift, deliberately unpompous manner that belongs to a more worldly conception of the knowledgeable man. They seemed to have an exaggerated respect for each other; I often thought how this would change if they found themselves in a parliament and took to the conventions of white party politics. But perhaps this excessive show of respect was already merely a sign of jealousy between them. All of them, the old and the young, were passionate men — the energy of passion was coiled steely and resilient, ready, in them.

I had moved from my old flat, and in the new one, undiscovered as yet by my neighbours or the caretaker, Peter and one or two others who had been the matrix of Steven’s daily life, came to see me. Even Lucky Chaputra came once or twice, awkward, worried and eager to absolve Steven from his shadow. ‘He wasn’t ever in on any of my deals, he just enjoyed knowing me and my crowd.’ Peter sat and drank a couple of brandies with me and didn’t talk much; we’d play some records and he would criticize the players, suddenly confident on his own ground. Wherever Steven’s friends gathered, in shebeens or at parties, his health was drunk, as if his death were another, and the craziest of his exploits. He hadn’t been cautious enough to survive; they admired him for it. Only by the exercise of constant caution, in word, deed, and most important, mind, could an African expect to survive. But he hadn’t cared to live that way; he was their sort of hero. Something in their faces when they drank to him made me shudder inwardly; I had only loved him as a man.

I had not been to the Alexanders’ for weeks. I couldn’t go there any more, that was all. Steven’s death had provided a check, a pause, when the strain of the kind of life I had been living for months broke in upon me. While I had kept going, simply carried along, I had not consciously been aware of the enormous strain of such a way of life, where one set of loyalties and interests made claims in direct conflict with another set, equally strong; where not only did I have to keep my friends physically apart, but could not even speak to one group about the others. I went to Sam’s house because there I could sit in silence, the silence of my confusion, and they would not question me. Sam, looking up from the notes he was making on a sheet of music manuscript, withdrawn behind his big spectacles, then suddenly seeing me and giving me that incongruous black sambo smile of his; Ella, earnest and big-bellied at her Mumford and John Stuart Mill. Was I with them, or were they a refuge? Could I give them up? Surrender them and accept the whisky and the jokes round the swimming pool? Why was it not as simple as giving up The High House?

Within, I started up in panic. Suppose theirs — Sam’s and Ella’s faces — were to be the casual face of destiny that I had known would claim me some day, the innocent unsuspecting involvement to which I would find I had committed myself, nailed the tail on the donkey with my eyes shut, and from which my life would never get free again? Like a neurotic struggling against a cure, I hugged to myself the aimless freedom that had hung about my neck so long. Suppose, when I went back to England, I should find that, for me, reality was left behind in Johannesburg?

Faunce’s letter lay in a drawer in my desk. I had not answered it. He had not mentioned not having received a reply; perhaps already he had discarded ’playing with the idea’ of my staying on in Africa. One or two years, longer? If I went on living here, how should I live?

Across the heads intimately drawn together in the Stratford Bar, Cecil sat with the chair beside her piled with parcels. As I came in, and hesitated a moment to find her in the smoky, vaguely underground atmosphere that always reminded me of London pubs, I saw her regard the parcels familiarly, as if, sitting there in a chair, was a friend of whom she knew what to expect. Then she saw me and hastily stuffed away, as it were, this feminine reverie, and put up her hand in her usual imperious style of greeting. She was as attractive as ever, not really beautiful, as I had once thought her, but irresistible in her defects, which she, in her vanity, crossly despaired of.