Nadine Gordimer - The Lying Days

Ludi was gone all day, fishing in the rain. I stood at the window, watching it come down; if you turned away it did not exist, it was quite soundless. You could only know it was there if you looked, and saw it falling, falling, without the sound of falling. The garden and the sea were a flash, perhaps seen yesterday, no more permanent than scenes turned toward me, then away, along the railway line. The sight had not been grasped sufficiently to exist for me somewhere beneath the rain. “He’s only got three weeks, so he’ll fish in any weather,” said Mrs. Koch, smiling for him. Her voice hung about the most trivial mention of her son with a gentle, unashamed expansion of love. Just as she spoke with emotion over the old photograph albums which she brought out to show to me, waiting for the expected face, the group of her dead husband, some friends, a frowning tall girl who she said was my mother at a picnic; faces shying from a long-set light of the sun.

Mrs. Koch did not attempt to “understand young people”; she did not apologize for her views or preferences. But it also never occurred to her to fear loss of dignity in showing that she felt, that she cared, that she had not the detachment of her years. I was drawn to her because she gave access to herself in a way that I did not know anyone ever did. Tears were embarrassments swallowed back, stalked out of the room, love was private (my parents and I had stopped kissing each other except on birthdays); yet tears were bright in Mrs. Koch’s eyes and one could still look at her. That same morning she had moved Ludi’s military cap where it lay in the kitchen; “I have been so happy here with him. And it was what he liked.” And she smiled and in the middle of the morning, in the middle of peeling fruit, tears had run down her cheeks, taking their place and their moment.

It rained again often, muffling up from the hills over the clear sky suddenly after a blazing morning; but it was no longer a soft restraint holding me back from the holiday. I went about in it, warm, soft, drenching where the ribbon grasses and the stiff lace bracken swept their dripping brushes past my legs, tingling lightly into my cheeks and eyes like tiny bubbles breaking when my face turned against it. Mrs. Koch and I trudged down to the store through the heavy mud that formed so quickly, and broke away in soggy runnels from the mixture of sea sand everywhere in the soil. Somebody stopped and gave us a lift, and in the store, that smelled of mice and millet and tobacco, we had tea with the storekeeper and his wife, a retired British army major with the pointlessly handsome face of a man of sixty left over from his days in uniform.

On the way back we met Ludi coming along the road from Plasketts’ without a coat, barefoot, soaked through, and he scolded us for being out. I knew that it was his mother for whom he was concerned, but he was always kind, and the concern was accepted for me, too. Then the rain ceased; suddenly, in a hollow, the grass, the air, the undergrowth steamed. Far behind grayness, the sun showed yellow as a fog lamp. We were steaming inside our clothes; threw off raincoats, the scarves enveloping our heads. Ludi, with his wet shorts clinging strongly to his buttocks, said: “Well, what can I do …?” And smiling wryly, like a father being imposed upon by children, loaded himself with our wraps. A bird called out somewhere as if the day were beginning over; some white, delicate flowers splashed all over common dark bushes let go their sweet breath again.

But mostly the sun shone, only the sun existed. In the mornings just after breakfast, the three of us pottered about the garden and the chicken houses. Ludi and his mother had the endless little consultations, the need to draw each other’s attention to this detail or that, the need even merely to remark one to the other what the other already thought or well knew, that people have who have long had a life in common and now live apart. Before Ludi had joined the army, he had been running some sort of little chicken farm; for five or six years after he had left school he had apparently had jobs of various kinds in various places — sometimes Mrs. Koch would say: When you were in Johannesburg … but you remember, it was when you were at Klerksdorp — always returning intermittently to the coast and his mother. What he had done during those months, it was difficult to say. Then there had been the idea of the chicken farm, and Mrs. Koch had bought the chickens and the necessary equipment and Ludi had built the runs and the troughs and the perches and the incubation shed by himself, in his own time. Whether the chicken farming was ever a success or not, it was again difficult to say; now Ludi was in the army, and most of the chickens had been sold, or had died, because Mrs. Koch could not look after them by herself.

Yet Ludi spent a great deal of time down at the chicken houses. He was mending the sagging wires, and dismantling and reassembling the incubator, which had deteriorated in some way through lack of use. The few fowls that were left wandered about unscientifically round his squatting figure. The morning sun, testing out its mounting power, frizzled brightness on his bright gold hair, and now and then he paused, frowning, took off his glasses and put them back. He looked strange without his glasses; someone else. Mrs. Koch came to him and went away again, her voice trailing off as she went over to feel the pawpaws pendulous from the finely engraved totem of a young palm but still green, then rising to a question as she returned and stood with her hand on her hip, drawing away from the sun. “But what happens to them, I’d like to know. I have a look at them and they’re green. And then when I come back in a day or two when they should be ripe, they’re gone. Now there are more green ones getting ready. But I never seem to see them ripen.”

“Hey, Matthew, the missus wants to know why the pawpaws don’t get ripe—” Ludi screwed his eyes up weak against the sun, calling to the native who was trailing slowly across the grass to an outhouse, carrying a rusty tin bath. “I didn’t see it,” said the servant, continuing.

Ludi squatted wider, giving his blunt burned hand a steadier grip on the screwdriver. Without lifting his reddened neck, he laughed. “Matthew!”

The native slowly lowered the bath and stopped, regarding us. He stood there in the sun.

The screwdriver slipped; Ludi grunted and tried again. His mother bent over a little, with the anxious grimace of someone who does not know what it is that is being attempted and proving difficult.

“I myself I never see those pawpaw,” said Matthew.

“Matthew!” Ludi shook his head.

The native burst into laughter, shaking his head, stopping to gasp, swinging up the bath in a mirror-flash, walking on in a flurry of culpable innocence. He laughed back at Ludi; Ludi laughed after him.

Ludi had gone into the incubation house. There was the sound of something being wrenched away. “Mother, did Plasketts ever take those brackets they asked for? There were two, I think, in the garage. Or in the shed.” “Which were they, dear—?” and she was in the dark doorway after him. I went back to the house to write a letter; I had written one when I arrived, had one from home. I went onto the veranda, sat down on the old green-painted chair at the shaky wicker table. I sat pulling at a fraying braid on the table top, my eyes half-closed at the glare that made a bright palpable mist of the space climbing up from the sea. The cane was so live a green that it seemed to be growing visibly; the river a twist of metallic light. Blossoms dropped silently from the frangipani trees. I sat there waving my bare foot.

It was impossible to write the letter; did it exist, a here and there, at this same morning? What could I write to the Mine, to the house with the lights on, the red haze of hair bending over the letter, handing it across the vegetable dishes. For one second I smelled the cold brick of the passage at the Mine offices. But it was not enough to create the existence of the Mine, to make it possible at the other end of a space of which this was at one end.