Nadine Gordimer - A World of Strangers

The Hollwards’ house was exactly the sort of house they would have had in England. Arthur laid the crazy paving himself and it was he who kept the standard roses tied to their supports; Mrs Hollward had refurnished the sitting-room in what she called ‘modern’ Swedish-style — low chairs covered in abstract design linen, lamps made out of Chianti bottles with raffia shades, a Van Gogh reproduction over the fireplace. Flower vases were in the form of hollow swans or fish; you stubbed out your cigarette in the gouged-out belly of a pottery rabbit. The whole managed to reproduce exactly the effect of the chintz-and-barbola-work scheme which it had evidently replaced.

Dinner was served by a thin, silent African woman with steel-rimmed spectacles, and several times, as dishes were carried back to the kitchen after we had been served, I heard Mrs Hollward instruct: ‘Cover that up and put it in the refrigerator’ or ‘You can finish that’. After dinner, Arthur gave me a South African cognac, which wasn’t bad, and talked some more about Faunce; Mrs Hollward listened with a sort of shy, polite glee, her pleasure in these anecdotes obviously increased rather than staled by their familiarity, as a child loves to hear its favourite fairy-tale over and over again.

The next night I found myself at a concert. When I left Arthur’s office at five, I went into the Stratford bar, not because I really wanted a drink, but because it was to be part of my surroundings for some time; I was prompted by the mixture of dogged resignation and curiosity which sends one peering all over a ship on which one is to be living for a few weeks. This Stratford was the sort of place that looked dreary and might well come to look absolutely trustworthy and welcoming as one invested it with habit. I’d only have to be there having a few drinks with a charming girl just once, to feel attached to the general uninvitingness of the place. But when I came to think of it, there were no women there at all; and in a way, that was rather nice, too. I eavesdropped over my beer, and it seemed that most of the men there were lawyers or newspapermen. Then I wandered back to the hotel through the harassed scurry of the afternoon rush — people didn’t seem to linger much in this city after work — and took a look at the scene in there.

The unvarying pinkish light shone on, as it had in the morning; in the great lounge, three cowed-looking café-musicians produced the musical equivalent of this light, while loud parties of flushed young men bought drinks for giggling girls unused to such splendour; older men, with faces arranged as carefully as their pale silk ties, rose to greet the heel-clicking entrance of elegant, disdainful girls who must be mannequins or actresses; and the tourist residents, whether English, American or Continental, looked curiously foreign among these others, who, if varied in class and purpose, were at least clearly on their own ground.

I took a look, and that was all; I went straight out into the street again. But it was hard, I found, to loiter in Johannesburg. It was a warm evening — the sun dying in angry flashes between the buildings — and I looked for a pavement café, but couldn’t find one. I looked into one or two other hotels, but they seemed much like my own. I found a park, and in it an art gallery — it was shut — but unless you are with a girl, or are a child, or are very old, somehow you can’t sit about in a park.

Where now? I said to myself.

And I crossed a bridge over a railway cutting into the town again. Down to my left, along the town bank of the cutting, I saw a thick queue sheltered under a tin roof. I walked a little way to see what it was about. And I saw that it was a bus queue; the people in it had the tired, unimpatient faces of those who wait in the same place at the same time every day. They were all black.

As I made my way uptown past the butchers’ shops and the dry cleaners’ and the corner hotel bars, I realized that the fact that they were black had come to me last, and least importantly, I had registered it as an afterthought, in fact. Whereas, in Mombasa, that day, when the launch approached the shore, the first thing that had struck me was the blackness, the Africanness of the faces waiting there. Yet I knew at once what the difference was. Those were peasants; the vacant, brutish-faced peasant, if you like, or the fine, unspoiled natural man — depends how you see it. These faces in the Johannesburg bus queue bore all the marks of initiation into western civilization; they were tired by city noise, distasteful jobs, worries about money, desires for things they couldn’t afford, their feet ached from standing and their heads ached from the drinking of the night before — much like those faces you used to see all over London in those endless queues during the war.

I had dinner in a third-rate restaurant with a fancy name, where the waiters were all Indian. The one who served me made a great show of busy zeal and produced my steak and limp, pale chips with a flourish, but the restaurant was almost empty, and the others stood around the walls, flicking their waiters’ napkins like horses switching at flies with their tails.

Then I began to walk again, with the vague intent of finding a cinema showing something I hadn’t seen in London; but I happened to walk past a hall where, in a crowd that spread out into the street, an enormous photograph announced an orchestral concert with a famous violinist as soloist. I had heard him four or five times at home, and I don’t suppose I should have gone out of my way to get in to hear him again, but somebody waved a ticket under my nose — a single ticket — and I bought it from him. While I took the money from my pocket, half a dozen people closed in hopefully round us in case the deal fell through and the ticket was still for sale. Anyway, it was mine, and I was a duly qualified member of the throng in a big, ugly foyer. Inside, the hall (I discovered that it was the city hall itself) was ugly, too. But the audience was not-ugly, I mean; there were some beautiful women there, and everyone had an air of ease, well- even if not always becomingly dressed, well-fed, and unruffled. There was a fair sprinkling of the sort of faces you see at concerts everywhere: the serious devotees, old men with crests of white hair, old ladies in shawls or oriental turbans, students who sat with downcast eyes over the score as if they were praying, pretty girls with strange hair styles and stranger clothes. I sat and listened in an atmosphere of perfume and silky furs; beringed hands and bleached hair; pomade and the lingering, after-dinner cigar smell in fine cloth. In the interval, the usual talk flew about: brass weak, pace a little too fast, violinist himself absolutely divine, violinist not so good as last year in Salzburg, violinist still the only interpreter of Mozart, violinist passé now, only good enough for South Africa — the same talk, with different place-names, that you hear at any concert in London.

When the concert was over, I streamed out with these glossy-looking people, and found my way between their cars and back to the hotel. In the lounge, the pink light still shone on what were either the same people I’d seen there at sundowner time, or others exactly like them. Except the tourists. They had gone to bed. One of them had left a pamphlet at the empty table at which I sat while I waited for a cup of coffee. AFRICA IN ALL ITS SAVAGE GLORY. ONLY HOURS AWAY. LUXURY SAFARI CARS PICK YOU UP AT YOUR JOHANNESBURG HOTEL, TAKE YOU TO THE KRUGER PARK — THE SAME DAY, YOU SEE LIONS, BUCK, HIPPO. AFTER A REFRESHING NIGHT’S SLEEP IN CAMP WITH ALL COMFORTS, YOU’RE OFF AGAIN, TO SEE ELEPHANT, GIRAFFE, AND MANY OTHER WILD ANIMALS IN THEIR NATURAL STATE, LIVING THE LAW OF THE JUNGLE. The next page told, in similar terms, of the native war dances to be seen twice monthly at a Mine compound near Johannesburg. On the next, a picture of a beautiful black girl with an enchanting smile, dressed in a beaded tribal costume, but with plump bared breasts, advertised the unspoilt charm of zululand. I felt as if I were reading of another country, from seas away. But then the country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby finger-print of reality upon the beautiful.