Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

‘Now, where did he get that from, I wonder?’

‘There’s a man called Derek Jackson. Well, he’s a friend of Guy and he was living with some woman who had a flat in the same building. She told him about it.’ She was frankly curious: ‘You mean you can actually sit down to dinner with them and it doesn’t seem any different to you?’

‘But they’re my friends. The man I’ve known best since I’ve been here was an African. He was killed in an accident in July.’

She looked at me, fascinated. ‘And they seem like other people to you? You were really fond of this chap?’

‘Yes,’ I said, embarrassed with myself because I was explaining my affection for Steven as if I were trying to make comprehensible a liking for the company of snakes, or chimpanzees, ‘I got on particularly well with him.’

She looked down at her hands, with the long, red, filbert nails. ‘You know, I can’t imagine it — I mean, a black man next to me at table, talking to me like anyone else. The idea of touching their hands — ’ Her hand came out in the imaginary experiment and hesitated, waved back.

I said, ‘It’s no good talking about it. Let’s forget it.’

We smiled at each other, holding the ground of the smile, two people who embrace without words on the strip between their two camps. Like an enemy, she had said of me. Like an enemy, I had lounged and taken my ease at The High House. Like an enemy: the word took away my freedom, tore up the safe conduct of the open mind.

Away down the platform, I saw the short, hurrying figure of Sam, coming toward me from the Africans’ end of the station. A dry, warm wind of spring, that took me back full circle to the days when I had arrived in Johannesburg a year ago, lifted the covers of the pulp magazines on the vendor’s stand, and the gritty benches, the rails below and the asphalt floor seemed dusted with shining mica. He came on briskly, waving once, grinning, and I saw him say something to a black child sitting on a bundle among squatting and lounging relatives. ‘I’ve squeezed in on the corner of Plein Street’ he said, holding up my car keys a moment before putting them in his pocket. He was going to use my car while I was away in Cape Town on Aden Parrot business for a month.

‘Don’t forget, you must always leave her in gear, the handbrake doesn’t hold.’

He laughed, ‘I won’t let her get away. I’ll even tighten that clutch pedal for you. Where’s the train?’

‘Late, I suppose. My name’s on the reservation list, all right, I’ve just looked.’

At this end of the platform, where white people stood about with suitcases and jewel-boxes and golf clubs, a woman close by turned her head and stared to hear us talking like any other friends saying good-bye. In a country where the simplest impulses are likely to be highly unconventional, it’s a little difficult at first to take such astonished, curious, and even hostile glances for what they are, and to learn to feel neither superior nor angry. I had by now succeeded in doing so. For Sam, of course, it was different; but perhaps long ago he had forged himself a grin for anger, and the Black Sambo smile was also the smile of a tiger.

While we talked, the hollow, bumbling voice of the public address system began, and although I could not make out the English announcement, Sam understood the one in Afrikaans that followed. The train was going to leave from platform eleven, not from platform fifteen. With the swiftly roused excitement of people who are about to go on any kind of journey, everyone was at once caught up in a stir of talk and activity, gathering together possessions, giving each other instructions and counter-instructions, saying goodbyes with the tentative tone of an orchestra tuning up. Sam and I picked up my stuff and trudged off up the platform. He was talking about his wife. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll get down to writing, but I’ll send you a telegram when the child’s born. If it’s a boy we’re going to call it after Steven. I wish you could have been the godfather, Ella says she doesn’t know anyone else she wants. .’ he was panting under the weight of a heavy case, and we were being buffetted together and apart by the press of people.

‘Good God,’ I said, twisting my head to him, ‘you talk as if I’m going for good. I’ll be back in a month. The baby’ll be just about born. I’m not leaving the country.’ In my pocket were two newspaper cuttings; and a letter. The cuttings came from the same week-old issue of the morning paper; the issue of the day on which the paper had broken suddenly out of its accepted place in the ritual of shaving and breakfast, for there, in it, was a list of black and white people arrested on a treason charge, and half-way down the list was Anna Louw’s name. She was out on bail and I had been to see her; she had been arrested because of her connexion with an organization of African women for whom she acted privately as unofficial legal adviser. The police had searched the cottage when they came for her before dawn, and the presence of Urmila, who was spending a few days there, had been an added mark against Anna.

When I read the list on that morning I felt myself suddenly within the world of dispossession, where the prison record is a mark of honour, exile is home, and family a committee of protest — that world I had watched, from afar, a foreign country, since childhood. Hours later, when I picked up the scattered pages of the paper I had left — in my haste to get to the telephone, confirmation, explanation of what I had read — I saw, on one of the fallen pages, one of those smiles that stare out, daily, from social columns. There it was — the face of Cecil, with Patterson, at a charity cabaret in a nightclub. It was a good one of her; she wore one of those dresses that look like a bandage across the breasts, and her pretty collar-bones showed as she hunched her shoulders in laughter. So I cut that out, too. The two pieces of newspaper rested in my wallet in polarity. In a curious way, they set me at peace; the letter that lay with them was the long letter to Faunce, written at last, asking him if he was still serious about replacing Hollward, and if so, telling him that I would stay on indefinitely.

‘What’s that? I do what?’ shouted Sam, grimacing in the effort to follow what I was saying.

‘What’s the fuss, I’ll be back before the baby’s born. You talk as if I’m going away for good.’

We stopped at the top of a flight of steps; he would have to use the other, for black men, further along. ‘Oh damn, I forgot about this.’ I tried to take the second case from him. But he was looking at me, a long look, oblivious of the people pushing past, a look to take me in, and he was smiling slowly, wryly, the pure, strange smile of one who is accustomed to the impossible promise that will be broken, the hand, so warm on the quay, that becomes a flutter across the gulf and soon disappears.

I said, ignoring the irritated eddy of the people whose way we were deflecting, ‘Sam, I’ll be back for the baby’s christening. If it’s born while I’m away, you let me know, and I’ll come back in time.’

He looked at me as if he had forgiven me, already, for something I did not even know I would commit. ‘Who knows,’ he shouted, hitching up his hold on the case, as people pushed between us, ‘Who knows with you people, Toby, man? Maybe you won’t come back at all. Something will keep you away. Something will prevent you, and we won’t—’ the rest was lost as we disappeared from each other down our separate stairways. But at the bottom of the steps, where the train was waiting, he was there before me, laughing and gasping, and we held each other by the arms, too short of breath to speak, and laughing too much to catch our breath, while a young policeman with an innocent face, on which suspicion was like the serious frown wrinkling the brow of a puppy, watched us.